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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > March > 04 > Entry
Horton Foote: 1916-2009
Texas playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote has died, the AP reported today.
A master storyteller and native of Wharton, Texas, Foote chronicled the human experience through the lens of the ordinary people who populated the small town America in such “The Trip to Bountiful,” “Tender Mercies” and his Oscar-winning screen adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
In all, his scripts earned him a Pulitzer Prize and two Academy Awards.
Although Foote left Wharton when he was 16, he kept the family home and in many ways, never left artistically. His plays and screenplays focused on the misleading pull of nostalgia.
“My first memory was of stories about the past — a past that, according to the storytellers, was superior in every way to the life then being lived,” Foote wrote in 1988. “It didn’t take me long, however, to understand that the present was all we had, for the past was gone and nothing could be done about it.”
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