Horton Foote, a playwright and screenwriter whose works about the yearning and efforts of people living in small towns won him two Academy Awards, an Emmy and a Pulitzer Prize, has passed away at the age of 92.

 

Horton Foote, whose most famous pieces included the Oscar-winning scripts for “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Tender Mercies,” died on Wednesday in Hartford, Connecticut, following a brief illness, his daughter, actress Hallie Foote, informed the New York Times.

 

Several of the playwright’s stories were set in the illusory town of Harrison and were bursting at the seams with suggestions and remarks from his own hometown, Wharton, Texas, thus prompting an admirer to affirm that the writer was to Texas what John Steinbeck was to California and Woody Allen is to New York.

 

Horton Foote was born on March 14, 1916, and was only an adolescent when he first left his hometown for California and subsequently New York in an attempt to fulfill his dream of becoming an actor. While working with a theater group in New York, Horton Foote drew the attention of renowned choreographer Agnes de Mille, who urged the then 25-year-old young man to write about Wharton.

 

Throughout the 1940s and ‘50s, Mr. Foote worked on plays for Broadway and television scripts and eventually picked up on screenplays. He was honored with his first Academy Award in 1962 for his adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The second Oscar came in 1983 for “Tender Mercies,” starring Robert Duvall as a country music singer who needed to attain deliverance.