Horton Foote's long, distinguished career in American playwriting started in the late 1930s and has continued without interruption to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although he has become known for the variety of his works for the media--including the screenplay adaptation of Harper Lee's 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, for which Foote won an Academy Award in 1962, and his pioneering contributions to the Golden Age of television--his development as a playwright shows his most meaningful writing. He has put his best efforts into drama, particularly his epic nine-play Orphans' Home Cycle (composed during the 1970s), and he received a Pulitzer Prize for The Young Man from Atlanta (1995). Foote's career is also marked by steady advancement in the dramatization of his fictional town of Harrison, Texas, a sustained achievement unequaled by contemporary dramatists.

Albert Horton Foote Jr. was born on 14 March 1916, in Wharton, Texas, the eldest son of...