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  • Blessed Assurance: The Life and Art of Horton Foote by Marion Castleberry
  • John Grammer
Blessed Assurance: The Life and Art of Horton Foote. By Marion Castleberry. Foreword by Hallie Foote. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2014. Pp. [xxxvi], 500. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-505-1.)

The Pulitzer Prize– and Academy Award–winning dramatist Horton Foote, author of The Trip to Bountiful (1962), The Young Man from Atlanta (1995), and Tender Mercies (1983), was part of a great generation of American playwrights. Born in Wharton, Texas, in 1916, Foote saw his first Broadway plays in the 1940s and emerged as a playwright alongside Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. In their lifetimes the three men were equally well known, and their posthumous reputations are all thriving. Each has been hailed as the greatest American playwright, but for different reasons.

Miller’s and Williams’s claims to greatness are supported by an extensive academic infrastructure: prominently published biographies, broad critical traditions, classroom-ready paperbacks of their major works that are always in print, handsome hardbacks enshrined in the canonical Library of America. With Foote it is otherwise. Most of his plays have long been out of print, while others are available only in cheap editions meant to support dramatic productions. Though there are now three biographies of Foote, all were published by regional or specialized presses, as were the handful of critical books on his work. Foote lives, for the average theater fan, not in the classroom or the library but in the productions that continue to be mounted in regional theaters throughout the country and in the excellent movies that are still being made of his best plays (two in 2014, one in 2015). His most persuasive advocates have been not critics or scholars but actors, who find in his understated scripts—as notable for their silences as for their showstopping speeches—an empowering freedom.

In both its strengths and its weaknesses, Marion Castleberry’s Blessed Assurance: The Life and Art of Horton Foote, which is the most recent and detailed of the three Foote biographies, can help explain the discrepancy. It shares the common tendency of Foote’s admirers to understand him mainly in terms of his regional origins and his Christian faith. This propensity threatens to define Foote as a kind of niche artist, offering “blessed assurance” [End Page 224] to those who share his faith or his background, but too easily ignored or to those who share his faith or his background, but too easily ignored or undervalued by those outside the circle.

Yet Castleberry is a meticulous biographer who also opens Foote up to a much broader range of interpretive perspectives. Foote’s fans might be surprised to learn that he wrote a number of experimental plays aimed at reproducing the dramatic power of modern dance, or that his greatest work, The Orphan’s Home Cycle, was as much influenced by the avant-garde music of John Cage as it was by the family memories the collection of nine plays enshrined. Though ultimately committed to the realistic family drama, Foote was a bold pioneer in many respects: he was among the first to exploit both the dramatic potential of television and the freedom of independently produced film, and his movie adaptations of classic fiction by William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Harper Lee, among others, revealed the creative potential in what had previously been dismissed as journeyman work.

Foote deserves the kind of wide-ranging critical appraisal that his contemporaries Miller and Williams have received, and Castleberry’s biography—informed by two decades of interviews with Foote himself, his family, and his colleagues—could be a step toward getting it. Blessed Assurance gives us the best possible account of Foote’s family background, the direct inspiration for much of his work. The book offers clear summaries of nearly all his work, major and minor, and a reliable chronicle of his long career, including fascinating accounts of theatrical and film productions. A serious scholarly reassessment of Horton Foote’s work is overdue, and should begin here.

John Grammer
University of the South
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