Gathers seventeen short plays set in the small Texas town of Harrison.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for The Young Man from Atlanta and Academy Awards for the screen adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird and the original screenplay Tender Mercies, as well as the recipient of an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of The Trip to Bountiful and the William Inge Lifetime Achievement Award, Horton Foote is one of America's most respected writers for stage and screen. The deep compassion he shows for his characters, the moral vision that infuses his social commentary, and the kindness and humanity that Foote himself radiates have also made him one of our most revered artists—the father-figure who understands our longings for home, for human connections, and for certainty in a world largely bereft of these. This literary biography thoroughly investigates how Horton Foote's life and worldview have shaped his works for stage, television, and film. Tracing the whole trajectory of Foote's career from his small-town Texas upbringing to the present day, Charles Watson demonstrates that Foote has created a fully imagined mythical world from the materials supplied by his own and his family's and friends' lives in Wharton, Texas, in the early twentieth century. Devoting attention to each of Foote's major works in turn, he shows how this world took shape in Foote's writing for the New York stage, Golden Age television, Hollywood films, and in his nine-play masterpiece, The Orphan's Home Cycle. Throughout, Watson's focus on Foote as a master playwright and his extensive use of the dramatist's unpublished correspondence make this literary biography required reading for all who admire the work of Horton Foote.

The Horton Foote Review is the scholarly journal of the Horton Foote Society, which is dedicated to the study of the life and work of the great American dramatist. Having received two Academy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the National Medal of Arts, Horton Foote is one of the most important living figures in the American Theater today. The six scholarly essays in this first volume of the journal are by scholars from diverse fields of learning and explore the importance of Mr. Foote's work (both stage and film) to the American literary tradition, with an eye for the importance of American drama during the twentieth century. The journal will appeal to anyone who believes in the power of drama as a sustaining influence in society. Contributors include: Richard A. Lusky, Robert Donahoo, Laurin Porter, Elizabeth Fifer, Meredith Sutton, and Gerald C. Wood.

This study is the first general critical introduction to the writing of Horton Foote, recipient of two Academy Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. These original essays survey Foote's career, his work for theater, television, and film, with analysis of Foote's major themes and characteristic style in all three media. The casebook concludes with a list of Foote's produced work, as well as a selective annotated bibliography of primary criticism on the playwright. This book demonstrates the influence of personal biography and Southern literature on Foote's career. The essayists also investigate the writer's contribution to American dramatic realism and independent filmmaking, emphasizing his experimentation with musical structure, dedramatization, and complex subtexts. Foote's disarmingly simple stories, with their radically understated language, are explained in many articles as the product of the subtle influence of the psychological and religious views of the author.

The play is set in a boarding house in a small town on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Three unmarried women, Alma Jean, Cutie and Miss Rowena, have lived there for years, watching the life of the town. Helen Crews, after a disagreement with her mother, also moves in; Helen had been engaged to Harvey Weems, a charming but weak young man, and the two mothers had managed to break off the engagement. Now Harvey, in love with Helen, but not strong enough to defy his mother, comes every night to Helen's window to call her name. Ralph Johnston, an attractive young man, has just moved to town, and into the boarding house, where he becomes very much interested in Helen. Thanks to Ralph's love, Helen is at last able to leave the town and go off to a happy life of her own and marriage, and Harvey, the midnight caller, is left behind, still calling for her.

Mention southern drama at a cocktail party or in an American literature survey, and you may hear cries for "Stella!" or laments for "gentleman callers." Yet southern drama depends on much more than a menagerie of highly strung spinsters and steel magnolias. Charles Watson explores this field from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century roots through the southern Literary Renaissance and Tennessee Williams's triumphs to the plays of Horton Foote, winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize. Such well known modern figures as Lillian Hellman and DuBose Heyward earn fresh looks, as does Tennessee Williams's changing depiction of the South—from sensitive analysis to outraged indictment—in response to the Civil Rights Movement. Watson links the work of the early Charleston dramatists and of Espy Williams, first modern dramatist of the South, to later twentieth-century drama. Strong heroines in plays of the Confederacy foreshadow the spunk of Tennessee Williams's Amanda Wingfield. Claiming that Beth Henley matches the satirical brilliance of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, Watson connects her zany humor to 1840s New Orleans farces. With this work, Watson has at last answered the call for a single-volume, comprehensive history of the South's dramatic literature. With fascinating detail and seasoned perception, he reveals the rich heritage of southern drama.

Provides a comprehensive guide to American dramatic literature, from its origins in the early days of the nation to American classics such as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Thornton Wilder's Our Town to the groundbreaking works of today's best writers.