Beginnings
A Memoir
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Since 1939, Horton Foote, "the Chekhov of the small town," has chronicled with compassion and acuity the experience of American life both intimate and universal. His adaptation of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and his original screenplay Tender Mercies earned him Academy Awards. He has won a Pulitzer Prize, the Gold Medal for Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for Drama, and the President's National Medal of Arts.
Beginnings is the story of Foote's discovery of his own vocation. He didn't always want to write. When he left Wharton, Texas, at the age of sixteen to study at the Pasadena Playhouse, Foote aspired to be an actor. He remembers the terror and excitement of leaving home during the Depression, his early exposure to the influences of German theater, and the speech lessons he took to "cure" him of his Southern drawl. He eventually arrives in New York to search for acting jobs and to study with some of the great Russian and American teachers of the 1930s. But after mixed results on the stage, he finally recognizes his true passion, writing.
From Martha Graham to Tennessee Williams, from Agnes de Mille to Lillian Gish, Horton collaborates with great artists in both dance and theater. The world he describes of fierce commitment and passion regardless of financial rewards is both captivating and inspiring. Through it all Horton maintains his genuine Southern charm, and he often travels home to Wharton, the town that nurtured him as a storyteller and has inspired his writing for the past sixty years. From one of the most moving and distinctive voices of our time, Beginnings is a rare, personal look at a fascinating era in American life, and at the making of a writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The lady opened her eyes then and looked up at me, and said, 'Seven hundred and fifty dollars is a fortune to me. A fortune.' 'Yes, ma'am,' I said, and I wished she would get off the subject. I felt guilty enough about my daddy spending the money without her going on about it." This conversation about acting school tuition, between the author and a woman on a bus during the depression, is emblematic of the tone of this memoir and the bulk of Foote's dramatic work (which concern both the conflicting worlds of his quiet Texas hometown and boisterous 1930s New York). The author of The Trip to Bountiful and scenarist for To Kill a Mockingbird,winner of two Academy Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, has penned a nostalgic record of his early career, picking up where his earlier memoir, Farewell(1999), left off. Foote has a gentle way with words and emotions, and while his early days at Pasadena Playhouse were difficult he had to lose his strong Texas accent to even be considered for roles, and dealt with family tragedies (e.g., an uncle's suicide) and near-fatal appendicitis the tenor and temper of his writing is always calming. After moving to New York in 1935, Foote continued acting, but also took up writing at the suggestion of Agnes de Mille and launched a new career as a playwright. Foote's portrayal of the New York theater and arts scene in the mid-1930s is fascinating he met or knew everyone from Lynn Riggs (who wrote the play upon which Oklahoma was based) to Tennessee Williams and the book ends after he meets his future wife, Lillian Vallish. Often scanty in details or world-shaking insights, Foote's chronicle is still as charming as his plays and will be welcomed by his fans.
