Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood

Amazon.com
The marvelous second chapter of Farewell sets the mood for everything to come in the noted playwright's memoir of his childhood in tiny Wharton, Texas. As a young Horton Foote questions his parents about their "elopement"--they had to go five blocks across town to be wed by a Baptist minister because his mother's Methodist parents didn't approve of the match--the intricate web of kinship, friendship, and local geography that shapes small-town life is hilariously yet touchingly revealed in each of their asides and elaborations. Foote's birth in 1916 healed the family rift, and he grew up in a cozy environment where everyone knew everyone else and more or less accepted their eccentricities. He doesn't gloss over the harsh realities of racial prejudice and segregation, but his tone is nonetheless elegiac, glowing with the magic of the characters' storytelling. Southerners have always been famous for their ability to spin yarns, and Foote captures that in extended passages of conversation. Direct quotes are generally cause for suspicion in a memoir, but when the dialogue has the same vigor and subtlety found in the author's screenplays and plays (A Trip to Bountiful and The Young Man from Atlanta among them), you're willing to give Foote the benefit of the doubt. --Wendy Smith


From Publishers Weekly
Though he later earned the moniker "Chekhov of the small town" for his portrayals of ordinary lives, Foote never heard of the Russian master until he went to California at 17 to study acting. In fact, despite a bookish childhood (the precocious Foote joined the Literary Guild and the Book of the Month Club at age 12), the playwright and screenwriter who won Oscars for To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies set out to act rather than write. His eventual change of path is beyond the territory of this genteel, unreflective childhood memoir, but clearly Foote's upbringing in small-town Wharton, Tex., in the 1920s had much to do with it. A backwater short on economic opportunities but disproportionately rich in colorful characters and tragic stories, WhartonAand Foote's extended family of storytellers, gossips and ne'er-do-well unclesAprovided abundant inspiration. While Wharton exhibited reflexive racism and dust-bowl poverty, Foote's family was progressive and prosperous. Former slaveholders, they rejected the most virulent Southern traditions for kindly paternalism: Foote tells of finding KKK robes stashed in a cupboard and learning that his grandfather attended one meeting out of a sense of very localized civic duty before resigning in disgust. Foote rarely moralizes or comments on how this, or anything for that matter, shaped him, instead relying on the dramatist's tool of dialogue to capture the textures of daily life. The book is so unreflective that it reads more like family history than memoir, frequently bogging down in perfunctory, dutiful tracings of every tangled limb of the ancestral tree. By far the most vivid character is Wharton, where every house and vacant lot, every storefront and street corner has a complex history. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Not surprisingly, Foote writes prose as beautifully as he crafts the dialog that has earned him Academy Awards for the screenplays of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Tender Mercies (1983) and a Pulitzer Prize for his play Young Man from Atlanta (Dutton, 1996). The celebrated octogenarian now movingly recalls his small-town Texas childhood, from his birth in 1916 to his departure for a theatrical education at the Pasadena Playhouse 17 years later. Along the way, Foote runs through reminiscences, stories, and yarns the way prunes run through a widow-woman. The townsfolk of Wharton, its eccentrics, and especially the extended Brooks family with its attendant quirks, secrets, and wastrel uncles are very simply conjured and, like the lower Colorado River on whose east bank the town is situated, flow continuously through the lazy arc of the narrative. Filled with tales of segregation, the river, cotton, and the Depression, Foote's memoir is a loving and gentle recollection that every library will want.ABarry X. Miller, Austin P.L. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
As anyone who has seen a Horton Foote play, such as The Man from Atlanta, or a movie made from one of his screenplays, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Tender Mercies, and A Trip to Bountiful, can attest, he is a sneaky storyteller. His tales, most of them set in the Texas of his childhood, unfold with the slow, easy grace of a flower opening to the sun. But this languor is deceptive, because before each story ends, it shakes its audience to the roots. The same can be said of his memoir. The loose collection of reminiscences of his childhood and family, from before his birth to his high-school graduation, loops back and forth in time with the relaxed air of after-dinner chat. But by the end of the all-too-brief, beautifully written volume, Foote's relations feel like our family, and Foote's memories of life in the segregated South before and during the Great Depression seem more vivid than any of our own. Jack Helbig


From Kirkus Reviews
Oscar-, Tony-, and Pulitzer-winning playwright and screenwriter Foote slowly recollects the minutiae of his Texas childhood in this foot-dragging, genealogy-laden memoir. Sometimes called the Chekhov of the small town, Foote has a shrewd and subtle understanding of the pettiness, gossip- mongering, and unassailable friendliness of small-town America. He also captures, all too well, the unremitting, mind-numbing dullness. Apart from young Horton growing up in this environment in Texas during the Depression and deciding to become an actor, very little happens beyond a few anecdotes, vast trenches of singularly unenlightening recollected dialogue, and numerous character sketches of Footes fellow townsfolk and far too numerous relatives. Its like being trapped in a tiny room with an elderly relative, forced hour after hour to listen to pointless reminiscences, shopworn stories, and didactic meanderings. Chekhov was never so affectless or self-indulgent. There is great potential here; Foote obviously has a fine-pitched ear for dialogue and a sure grasp of character, yet almost everything is out of balance. Foote still lives in the house he was raised in, and he provides interesting hints at how much has changed, but hes so concerned with describing every last twig of his family tree, from great- great-grandpappy Foote forward, that he misses this opportunity, and so many others, to reflect more broadly and tellingly on his life and times and circumstances. Readers can only wish that Foote had chosen to stick to art instead of life. Footes life may have become more exciting in the years following those circumscribed by this memoir. On its own weak terms, however, hes off to an unpromising start. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
Dan Hulbert The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Intimate astonishments jump out -- like fish breaking the surface of a still, dark lake from Foote's quiet, warm, dignified narrative....If you are new to Foote, Farewell may prompt you to explore his distinguished body of work. When the 16-year-old Horton boards the bus for Dallas and acting school, and bids farewell to Wharton, you may find yourself impatient for another installment of his long and well-lived life.


Book Description
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's To Kill a Mockingbird and his original screenplay Tender Mercies earned him Academy Awards. He received an Indie Award for Best Writer for The Trip to Bountiful and a Pulitzer Prize for The 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, in Farewell, 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. Farewell is 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.


Download Description
In 1917, when Horton Foote was one year old, his family moved into a house on his grandparents property in Wharton, Texas. Seventy years later, he returned to that house where he still lives. And while the years between took this acclaimed writer many literal and figurative miles, he remained forever tied to the Texas roots that he explores in Farewell. Foote reveals memories of a complex Southern family full of secrets, an aspiring young actor shaped by the storytellers around him, and a world changing at a frenetic pace. Foote, the author of A Trip to Bountiful, remembers a time in which black and white children played together until school age, when segregation forced them apart. But by drawing on the experiences of those around him, he transforms his memoir into something else entirely: a glimpse into history, and a heartfelt tribute to the passions, ideals, and complexities of small-town American life in the early part of this century. It is also a testimony to the power of storytelling. There is a frank simplicity in Foote's telling that makes Farewell a profoundly moving and illuminating reading experience, one that will long be remembered.


About the Author
Horton Foote has written and adapted dozens of plays and screenplays, including The Trip to Bountiful, The Young Man from Atlanta, Tender Mercies, and To 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.


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