The Marvelous Mind of Mr. Foote

Jeanne Strongin

As I'm going to see the stage version of "The Trip to Bountiful," I thought I'd take the opportunity to reacquaint myself with its author, Horton Foote. He is, if you will recall, the genius who turned Harper Lee's classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, into filmic gold. Like so many of our best writers (Twain, Faulkner, Chopin, Williams, Welty, O'Connor, Hurston, Porter, and Capote, to name just a few), Foote hailed from the South and got much of his inspiration from there: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/26/lucky-man