Horton Foote s uniquely personal style of screenwriting is at its peak in this collection of two Academy Award winners, To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies, and The Trip to Bountiful, a film widely named as one of 1985 s best. In an age when the lexicon of cinema is largely visual, noted Samuel G. Freedman in the New York Times Magazine, Foote writes films. He stresses dialogue and character development rather than spectacle or even traditional narrative.
Each of the three screenplays sprang from a different origin. One was adapted from the novel by Harper Lee, who later wrote, If...

A family is a remarkable thing, isn't it? You belong. And then you don't. It passes you by. Unless you start a family of your own. The last two plays of Horton Foote's Orphans' Home Cycle both expand and contract the circle of a family that unifies all nine of the plays. In Cousins, an operation on Horace Robedaux's mother reunites, in person and in memory, the many Robedaux relatives (one of whom speaks the lines quoted above), and in the almost comic proliferation of cousins that results, the orphaned Horace is joined across time and space to a family that seems never to end. The Death of...

This is the central volume in Horton Foote s remarkable nine-play Orphans Home Cycle, in which the author chronicles the evolution of a familythe strengths that bind its members together and the strains that force them apartand the cataclysmic changes in Southern society over twenty-six turbulent years. Beginning in 1902 with the death of the protagonist s fathera loss that sends twelve-year-old Horace Robedaux on an odyssey to the darkest corners of the heartand ending in 1928 with another momentous funeral, Foote traces a lineage of loss and regeneration.
Caught in a conflict as old as...