Horton Foote and the Theater of Intimacy

Even though Texas native Horton Foote has won two Academy Awards for screenwriting (To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies) and a Pulitzer Prize in drama (The Young Man from Atlanta), his work remains largely misunderstood as sentimental local color and a superficial brand of historical realism. Based in part on several interviews with Foote and on examination of his private papers, Horton Foote and the Theater of Intimacy persuasively argues a different take on Foote's plays. Gerald Wood maintains that intimacy is the central issue of Foote's political vision, that his work is a personal form of southern psychological realism, grounded in the creative tension between a desire to report the stories of his region truthfully and the belief that love remains a source of meaning, identity, and order in twentieth-century life.