Farewell A Memoir of a Texas Childhood [Paperback]

For more than five decades, Horton Foote, the Chekhov of the small town, has chronicled the changes in American life -- both intimate and universal. His adaptation of Harper Lee'sTo Kill a Mockingbirdand his original screenplayTender Merciesearned him Academy Awards. He received an Indie Award for Best Writer forThe Trip to Bountifuland a Pulitzer Prize forThe Young Man from Atlanta.
In his plays and films, Foote has returned over and over again to Wharton, Texas, where he was born and where he lives, once again, in the house in which he grew up. Now for the first time, inFarewell,Foote turns to prose to tell his own story and the stories of the real people who have inspired his characters. His memoir is both a celebration of the immense importance of community and evidence that even a strong community cannot save a lost soul.Farewellis as deeply moving as the best of Foote's writing for film and theater, and a gorgeous testimony to his own faith in the human spirit.Horton Footehas written and adapted dozens of plays and screenplays, includingThe Trip to Bountiful, The Young Man from Atlanta, Tender Mercies,andTo Kill a Mockingbird.Foote has won Academy and Writers Guild awards, as well as the Pulitzer Prize. In 1996 he was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame, and in 1998, to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also received the Academy's Gold Medal for Drama for his life's work.Chapter One

I left my home in Wharton at sixteen, but no matter how poor I was, and I was often very poor, I always managed to return for a visit at least once a year, and whenever I met with friends or relatives on those visits we inevitably got around to: Do you remember when, or I wonder whatever happened to ...

I was the first grandchild born into the extended family that surrounded me in Wharton and Houston. On my father's side I had a grandmother, a stepgrandfather, an aunt, three greal3;