Beginnings: A Memoir

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Horton Foote has chronicled the experiences of American life in both his internationally acclaimed plays and his Academy Award-winning screenplays To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies. Now, in this poignant and delightful memoir, he tells the story of how he discovered his own vocation.

Horton Foote recalls his youthful aspirations, leaving his Depression-era Texas home to become an actor at age sixteen. He lands in New York City to search for work — and to study with some of the great Russian and American drama teachers of the 1930s. But after mixed results on the stage, he finally recognizes his true passion: the written word.

Collaborating with such legendary talents as Tennessee Williams, Agnes de Mille, and Lillian Gish, Foote thrived in a world of artistic commitment and creative passion. Yet through it all, Horton maintained his genuine Southern charm, often returning home to Wharton, the town that nurtured and inspired him as a storyteller.

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 an American literary icon.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Horton Foote has chronicled the experiences of American life in both his internationally acclaimed plays and his Academy Award-winning screenplays To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies. Now, in this poignant and delightful memoir, he tells the story of how he discovered his own vocation.

Horton Foote recalls his youthful aspirations, leaving his Depression-era Texas home to become an actor at age sixteen. He lands in New York City to search for work — and to study with some of the great Russian and American drama teachers of the 1930s. But after mixed results on the stage, he finally recognizes his true passion: the written word.

Collaborating with such legendary talents as Tennessee Williams, Agnes de Mille, and Lillian Gish, Foote thrived in a world of artistic commitment and creative passion. Yet through it all, Horton maintained his genuine Southern charm, often returning home to Wharton, the town that nurtured and inspired him as a storyteller.

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 an American literary icon.

Book Magazine

Playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote never hurries his stories. His plays reveal their secrets slowly. Even the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, for which Foote wrote the screenplay, features a series of graceful, lingering scenes. So it should come as no surprise that Foote takes his sweet time with this memoir. Beginnings, which starts where 2000's Farewell ends, recounts Foote's move in the middle of the Depression to Pasedena, California, where he was an acting student at the Pasedena Playhouse. Foote tells dozens of absorbing anecdotes about his life, including his struggles to drop his Texan accent and his first years as a starving actor in New York. Some readers may find the languid pace frustrating, but those willing to exercise patience will find this memoir enthralling.
—Jack Helbig

Horton Foote, born in Wharton, Texas, in 1916, has written and adapted over fifty plays and screenplays, including The Trip to Bountiful, The Young Man from Atlanta, Tender Mercies, and To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1996 he was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame, and in 1998, to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, from which he received the Gold Medal for Drama for his life's work. Foote has won two Oscars, a Pulitzer Prize, Writers Guild awards, and the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for Drama, and was most recently awarded the president's National Medal of Arts from former President Bill Clinton.