Orphans' Home: The Voice and Vision of Horton Foote. By Laurin Porter. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003; pp. 233. $49.95 cloth, $22.95 paper

Horton Foote has won many distinguished awards, including two Academy Awards for screenwriting, the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the Lucille Lortel Award, an Emmy, the William Inge Award, lifetime awards from the Academy of Arts and Letters and the Writer's Guild of America, an Outer Critics Circle Award, the Master American Dramatist Award of the PEN American Center, and the National Medal of the Arts. Yet there has been relatively little written about this important American—and southern—writer. Partly that is because he has written in various media, including theatre, film, and television, gaining substantial but limited fame in each, and much of his work is either produced regionally or staged for a small circle of aficionados in New York, where seemingly simple, understated dramas about coastal southeast Texas are never the rage. This tendency is exacerbated by the production history of the nine plays in The Orphans' Home, the subject of Laurin Porter's book. Staged over twenty years, from readings of the first plays in 1977 to the premiere of the final one, The Death of Papa, at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in February of 1997, the plays have never been staged together.