Horton Foote
(b. 1916)

Playwright Horton Foote, one of America's leading dramatists, has won many prestigious awards for his original and adapted screenplays, including two Academy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and a National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton. His plays explore the lives of ordinary people and the courage they demonstrate in the trials and disappointments of life.

Foote left his Wharton, Texas, home at the age of 16 to study acting in California. After six years, he went to New York and was cast in several Off-Broadway plays. While performing with the American Actors Company, Foote turned his interest to writing. His early work focused on television drama, but his career then led him back to Hollywood. In Hollywood, he wrote an adaptation of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, for which he won his first Academy Award in 1962. From 1962 to the early 1980s, Foote was a prolific writer. At the request of actor Robert Duvall, Foote wrote the screenplay Tender Mercies, which earned him his second Academy Award in 1983. Duvall, who starred in the film, won an Academy Award for Best Actor.

In 1995, Foote's drama The Young Man From Atlanta won a Pulitzer Prize. His most recent work is Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood (1999), a nonfiction account of his life in Wharton, Texas.

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