Farewell

by Horton Foote

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.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Southern, Biography

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1999

About the author

Albert Horton Foote, Jr. was an American playwright and screenwriter, perhaps best known for his Academy Award-winning screenplays for the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird and the 1983 film Tender Mercies, and his notable live television dramas during the Golden Age of Television. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1995 for his play The Young Man From Atlanta.

Reviews

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an easy paced memoir of his Texas childhood by the man who wrote the screenplay for To Kill A Mockingbird, Tender Mercies, and A Trip To Bountiful. Wharton was a small southern town near Houston, full of people who would be institutionalized these days, but in the 20's and 30's of the last century, were simply known as "characters". The slow pacing made it perfect for bedtime reading, and you could hear the Southern drawl in the dialogue.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book. A memoir by a man whom some consider the Chekhov of America. He turns memories into poetry. It's non linear approach perfectly mimics the mystery of memories and the lore of family. It ultimately is about change. Yet, despite all the change from one century to the next, the essentials of human existence haven't changed much. Economic worries, political disputes, family squabbles, addiction, friendship, racial concerns and personal dreams are evident through out this memoir of the early part of the 20th century just as they are still today. Anyone who had a childhood and a family could enjoy this book.

Sadly, Horton Foote recently passed away at the age of 92. Having just read this book I found his passing that much more of a loss. Thankfully his beautiful works will live on.

[Sevelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rather a ‘soft’ autobiography and a kind and forgiving picture of life in early 20th C. Texas. His family had deep roots in the Jim Crow South and he offers a safe picture of his family’s very patrician role in everyday life, when everyone knew their place and kept in it, especially as regards the land and property. There’s nothing daring surprising or or brutally honest here. The book’s appeal will be strongest for people who want just that. The writer wrote Trip to Bountiful and Tender Mercies, both of which were huge film hits for their size and time, and both were pleasing and offered little in the way of controversy. The book’s main strength is how it gives the reader a glimpse at how to write dialogue, and there’s plenty of it here. It’s his stock in trade, and he has few rivals in that regard. Otherwise, it is a pleasant read written largely through a filter of billowing lace curtains in the parlor and lots of iced tea.

[Padraic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foote is like Hemingway minus the macho. His lean, clean prose is addictive, reflecting his need to write dialog for plays and film that is easy on the ear. But the architecture of his prose shows an incredibly fine mind. Recommendation: try reading some of this out loud. It comes to life and makes you realize what a great writer he is.

[Katy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this every summer - even if it is a portrait of a time long gone, it is so familiar and comfortable. It becomes so incredibly obvious why Horton Foote is known as "the Chekhov of the small town" in this book. I drove through Wharton on my way to Houston almost every two week when I lived down on the South coast of Texas, and every time I did I thought about Foote and this book.

[Sam Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Satisfying read all around. It feels like you are sitting in an old drugstore and listening to him talk about his life and stories. Small town, olden days feel that just warms the heart to a degree. By no means a real page turner but satisfying nonetheless.

[Louise Turner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horton Foote earned my respect (and I would even say love) as a screenwriter when he took "To Kill a Mockingbird", one of the books I treasure most, and wrote a movie script that captures the spirit of the book so well and, I think, is every bit as good as its source. The book "Farewell" tells of his growing up in a small Texas town and is a warm and loving look back at the people and events that shaped his life and led him to a career far away from that place. It is clear, however, that this place and its people were always with him. Loved this book.

[Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. This is a charming memoir of a boy growing up in Wharton, Texas in the early 1900s. There is abundant dialog, mostly regarding the boy's curiosity about his family and characters of the town. The author peppers his writing with unique (to me) sentences that are structured with - I think - a noun clause followed by an independent clause. For example, "The flood of 1913 was the one my father talked about the most." Another - "Aunt Laura in her sophomore year in high school had been sent away to a girl's school in San Antonio,..."

[Karen Hogan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never heard of Horton Foote prior to reading this memoir. He wrote the screenplay for "to kill a mockingbird, which was an amazing movie. I have never seen his other movies Tender Mercies or Trip to Bountiful. Horton Foote's ancestors were Texas plantation owners. It was interesting to read about the inevitable decline of his family. His memoir of the small town of Wharton, paralleled my small home town in upstate New York. I also emphasized with the failure of his Uncles to continue the legacy of their parents. Each generation becoming a little less than the generation before. Often children of privilege, fail at life....

[Shelley · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I have 3 bookcases filed with books, and pull out Farewell A Memoir of a Texas Childhood, and discover it's been sitting on the shelf since November 2015, 5 years ago, it's time to read it.

This is Horton Foote's memoir of growing up in rural Texas in the early 1900's. He was born in small town Wharton, Texas in an extended multigenerational family, amongst what was once cotton plantation homes. If every child asked questions about their family members the way Foote did, Ancestry.com wouldn’t be around. Even when he heard the story over and over again of a family member, or a family member’s friend, he would ask about them/want to know their story. It’s quite remarkable that his family/family friends never grew impatient with him.

Horton Foote is long gone; he died in 2009. He wanted to be an actor from the time he was a young boy. Turns out acting wasn’t for him, and he became a screenwriter and wrote the screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird among others.

Foote added some of his family pictures in the book. I wish he had added more. It was fun looking at such old pictures, and putting a face to the family member he was talking about.

Something I didn’t know:

“The handful of white Republicans left joined (in reference to the paragraph before) the White Man’s Union, so they could vote in local and state elections. The blacks were totally disenfranchised from voting except in national elections, and even then had to pay a poll tax, which few of them could afford.”

WOW!

I found myself breezing through the story quite easily as it was charming and interesting. My favourite tale was Horton, a young teenager, after his shift at the theater. He had just enough money to buy a Coke, upon discovering that quarter was no longer in his pocket when he went to pay the bill. There’s something that happens after that that made me chuckle.

Only 10 pages further along, I got my second chuckle and ended up being another favourite tale of his. His mother was telling him the story of a friend, Mrs. Willford, who was a crusty old woman:

“Mrs. Willford got kind of peculiar towards the end, you know,” I said. “She said it was her duty before she died to teach the men in Wharton to act like gentlemen, and so whenever she met a man uptown who didn’t tip his hat, and say, how are you today, Mrs. Willford, I hope well, she would take her walking stick and hit him.”

I'll think I'll end my review at that.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Motivation:

Dr. Philip Smith required my Texas History class to read this four years ago. I never read it. But after reading To Kill a Mockingbird, I wanted to read about the screenwriter.

Takeaways:

1) Foote’s nostalgia and sentimentality were two friendly little guests I enjoyed listening from in the book. Self-awareness pulled a seat up to the table midway through his memoir, and during those moments I underlined and underlined and underlined.

2) Just as we see in our own lives, each generation knows less and less about the previous ones. I wish I paid closer attention to my loved ones, especially my maternal grandparents, before they passed. Foote knew a lot about all his assorted kin—I think his generation and the two after are great keepers of the past. It is sad to think of all that’s passed in history, and how most of us don’t even realize the gravity of the simple lives people had led are just the same as the ones we live... People remember very little. At death’s door, the only ones that matter are the people at your bedside holding your hand.

3) Small town USA was in slow decline long before 2008... It was interesting to read a non biased look into what tenant farming and sharecropping were, and why middle-class white men were indolent drunks. Just fascinating to read!

4) I loved Little Horton’s father. I adored every vignette about his men’s clothing store. I painted scenes in my head of fictional stories I could write based on his recollections.

Overall, this was a book I’ll cherish. It took a few years of maturity for me to appreciate all that Foote conveys. Horton Foote is a man of great depth. This will be a memoir I’ll return to years from now.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Horton Foote grew up in small town Wharton, Texas, in an extended multigenerational family amongst the cotton fields of former plantations. Family stories, discussions, relationships dominate this remembrance of a time that has passed.

It reminds me a great deal of the little Texas town I grew up in, but little cotton grown and no former slaves or black people at all. East Texas and the Hill Country are miles apart in distance as well as culture. One thing was the same: soft drinks (Cokes, etc.) were called soda water.

[Cindy Bonner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads like an oral history. Thoroughly enjoyable. I probably love Horton Foote so much because he was a Texan and his stories all resonate. The language is reminiscent of words and phrases I often heard as a girl in the 1950s and 60s, even though that was easily thirty years after the incidents in this book take place. The world changed slower back then, and families stayed closer together. I recommend this to anyone who likes nostalgia.

[Wendy · Rating 2 out of 5]

For awhile, I was keeping up with all his family but the telling just got so convoluted that I found myself just skipping whole passages just to be done with the book. It seemed lesser and lesser about him and more and more about these relatives of his. And then it ended. I was hoping for more.

[Carol Bayley · Rating 2 out of 5]

The two time Oscar-winning screenwriter and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama is not a good memoirist. The book is filled with long lists of family names from three generations back with few anectodes about the "characters." Perhaps he was concerned about offending family members.

His small town background was similar to Harper Lee's real life and the setting for "To Kill a Mockingbird."

In contrast, Charles Shields' biography of Harper Lee, "Mockingbird" was excellent.

[Odoublegood · Rating 2 out of 5]

small-town life in a fading cotton economy

[Mike Horne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing wrong with this book. A good story about a small Texas town and the folks in it. It just did not grab me. It did make me want to go back and watch Tender Mercies and A Trip to Bountiful.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

memoirs always interest me. Light easy read

[Madison]

good memoir