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Southern Writer, Horton Foote


            In the early 1900's, Wharton, Texas was a small town where "everyone knew everyone" "(Horton Foote et al., 2010) and much of the history of the town was passed from generation to generation through oral tradition. Born in 1916, Foote grew up quietly listening to the stories and histories narrated by his father. It was in this rural storytelling southern town where Foote paid close attention to the conversations and interactions of the people surrounding him. Throughout his works, Foote is praised for his ability to create dialogue between characters with the capacity to captivate an audience while maintaining a completely natural feel. Foote's writing style would help to provide a voice for multiple significant authors of his time period, including Harper Lee, and William Faulkner. In 1962 Foote won the Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay for his adaptation of Harper Lee's novel To Kill A Mockingbird, which Harper Lee called "a work of such quiet and unobtrusive excellence that many people have commented the film's dialogue was lifted chapter and verse from the novel. This is simply not so."(Horton Foote et al., 2010). Lee commends Foote for his ability to create a natural feeling rhetoric between two characters on screen without using the dialogue in the novel verbatim. The naturalistic style of conversation that Foote was creating between his characters was a change from the character dialogue of the plays and screenplays of the time, which were often over dramatic and complicated, Foote wanted "to write plays simply and directly "(Haynes et al., 2003) which was the product of the years he spent listening to the stories told by the people in his life that surrounded him every day.
             Foote has been successfully using in his plays and screenplays throughout the years, along with his ability to create a natural dialogue is the themes. Although Foote moved away from Texas and eventually ended up in New York, many of the themes in his artistic works are southern based.


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