Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1986

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Charles Maland

Abstract

Horton Foote is a dramatist-screenwriter who has been writing personal plays and screenplays for over forty years. Though he has won two Oscars and was nominated for a third, and though he has seen several of his plays performed on Broadway, he remains today a relatively unknown figure in the arts. A major reason for his anonymity is his refusal to compromise his work for the sole purpose of making money, of becoming part of the Hollywood or any other corporate system. Thus Foote's literary canon deals with normal, everyday people confronting the compromises, the disillusionment, and the grief that life so often brings. The crucial themes of his work focus on how these people face and often accept the fact that their lifelong dreams of security, comfort, and in some cases, wealth and fame, will probably never be realized. In essence, Foote belongs in the tradition of Arthur Miller and William Faulkner: authors who write of the complexity and tragedy of the human experience, of a world which so often presents problems without offering any solution to them.

Through extensive research into the historical, socio-economic, and dramatic background in which Foote grew up and began his career, interviews with Foote himself, and close analysis of every available work by Foote, this study explores the thematic core of Foote's literary world as it evolved from his first plays in the early 1940s to the screenplays he continues to work on today. Throughout that career Foote has written persistently about human beings struggling to fulfill their dreams and to overcome the losses which inevitably come their way.

Besides focusing on the central themes of Foote's literary world, this study also touches on the external factors which affected the shape of Foote's career. These external factors include trends in the American theater in the 1930s and 1940s, the rise and fall of live television drama in the 1950s, Foote's fortunes as a screenwriter for feature films, and Foote's own family. This final factor, Foote's relationship with his family, may ultimately be the most important influence on his work. It has been a relationship that has both nurtured him and provided him with the sustenance for, and at times even the substance of, his writing. For in a fundamental way, Foote has always written about his own family, especially his mother and father, whose lives form the basis of a nine-play cycle which he is currently adapting to film.

The fundamental aim of this study is thus to define the literary world of Horton Foote through close analysis of Foote's works and references to those external factors which contribute to an understanding of that world.

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