Horton Foote was a descendant of an early governor of Texas, whose portrait hangs in the Texas state capitol in Austin. Foote started his career as an actor then learned the play writing techniques of the Russian Masters and ultimately was the only writer to be personally approved by author Harper Lee to write the adapted screenplay for the classic book, To Kill a Mockingbird. His adapted screenplay for the film won him an Academy Award and a permanent reputation as a respected writer around the world. He won many other awards for film television and theater as well. Additionally, the Directors Guild of America named an annual playwriting award after Horton Foote.
Foote is today still best known for To Kill a Mockingbird, but other major works include The Trip to Bountiful and Tender Mercies. A Broadway Revival of The Trip to Bountiful staring Cecily Tyson, yielded full house Standing Ovations in New York and Los Angeles and became a lifetime television movie in 2014. Tender Mercies starred Robert Duvall who played Bo Radley in the film To Kill a Mockingbird. Horton Foote’s famous cousin, Shelby Foote, was featured frequently as a commentator in the Ken Burns Civil War series. In that same series, Horton Foote performed the voice of Jefferson Davis.
Larry Jeff McMurtry is an American novelist, essayist, bookseller, and screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the Old West or in contemporary Texas. His novels include Horseman, Pass By (1962), The Last Picture Show (1966), and Terms of Endearment (1975), which were adapted into films earning a total of 26 Oscar nominations (10 wins).
His 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove, was adapted into a television miniseries that earned 18 Emmy Award nominations (seven wins). The subsequent three novels in his Lonesome Dove series were adapted as three more miniseries, earning eight more Emmy nominations.
Professor Carlos Dews was born in Nacogdoches, Texas. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. (with honors) in Humanities, and was conferred M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in American Literature by the University of Minnesota. When a friend introduced him to the work of Carson McCullers, Dews discovered an affinity for her writing. This led to his doctoral dissertation on her unfinished autobiography. Five years later, after working for ten years to get permission to publish the work, he edited Illumination and Night Glare, the book based on her dictated notes for her autobiography. Professor Dues was interviewed on The Oprah Winfrey Show in April 2004, discussing Carson McCullers’ life and literary accomplishments. An early interview with McCullers herself is shown below.
Professor Dews returned to graduate school at the New School University in New York, following completion of an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing in 2008, he relocated to Rome, Italy, where he is full professor and chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at John Cabot University, director of the Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation, and Director of Italy Reads in Rome.
Professor Dews is also on the faculty of Art Workshop International in Assisi, Italy, where he teaches creative writing. He is a member of the Authors Guild, International Thriller Writers, American Literature Association, and the Carson McCullers Society (past president).
Attica Locke was born in Houston, Texas, she is an American fiction author and writer/producer for television and film. A graduate of Northwestern University, Locke was a fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmakers Lab in 1999, studying screenwriting and directing. She has written scripts for Paramount, Warner Bros., Disney, 20th Century Fox, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, HBO, and DreamWorks. She was a writer and producer on the Fox drama Empire.
In 2013 she received the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence –for The Cutting Season. In 2016 she received the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, for Pleasantville. In 2018 she received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel of the Year –Bluebird, Bluebird.
Katherine Anne Porter was an American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. She was born in Indian Creek, Texas as Callie Russell Porter. Her family tree can be traced back to American frontiersman Daniel Boone and the writer O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), her father’s second cousin. In 1915, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Katherine almost died in Denver during the 1918 flu pandemic. When she was discharged from the hospital months later, she was frail and completely bald. When her hair finally grew back, it was white and remained that color for the rest of her life. Her experience was reflected in her writing of Pale Horse, Pale Rider.
Porter published Ship of Fools, in 1962; it was based on her reminiscences of a 1931 ocean cruise she had taken from Vera Cruz, Mexico, to Germany.
In 1966 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the U.S. National Book Award for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter.
In the interview below, Barrett Prettyman, a close friend of Katherine Anne Porter, tells of his professional and personal association with Porter as well as his work for his client Truman Capote.
E. Barrett Prettyman Jr. was the son Judge E. Barrett Prettyman, Sr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, for whom the Federal Courthouse is named. Mr. Prettyman graduated from Yale University and the University Of Virginia School of Law. Mr. Prettyman became law clerk to three Supreme Court Justices: the Honorable Robert H. Jackson, the Honorable Felix Frankfurter, and the Honorable John M. Harlan. Mr. Prettyman was clerking at the Court during both the decision and the decree in the school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. He took the position of Special Assistant to the Attorney General and to the White House during the Kennedy Administration. Notably, during his time at the White House, Mr. Prettyman traveled to Cuba and personally negotiated with Fidel Castro for the exchange of 1,113 Bay of Pigs prisoners. Mr. Prettyman was also an accomplished novelist. He won an Edgar Allen Poe Award for his novel, Death and the Supreme Court. He was a past president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.