The move back to Diane’s hometown was the kind of decision that single parents make when they need support: the support of family networks, of familiar surroundings, of a community that already knows them. For Woody, arriving in Lebanon at eleven from Houston was the immigrant experience in miniature — a new place with different codes, different social hierarchies, different ways of establishing yourself. He attended Lebanon High School and graduated in 1979.
His high school years are not extensively documented in the public record. What is documented is that he was interested in theater — that the performing arts gave him a direction and a context in Lebanon that other social structures did not. This is a common biographical pattern for actors of his generation: the high school theater program as the place where a person who doesn’t quite fit the primary social landscape of American secondary education finds both community and a skill set that turns out to be professionally useful. Woody Harrelson does not appear to have been a conventionally successful high school student in the ways American high schools reward — sports, grades in conventional subjects, the social hierarchies that organize adolescent life. He was, by the available evidence, someone who found in performance something that other teenagers find in athletics or academics or social institutions.
Hanover College, in Hanover, Indiana, was his next step — a small Presbyterian liberal arts school on a bluff above the Ohio River, about sixty miles southeast of Indianapolis. It was founded in 1827, making it the oldest private college in Indiana, and it has the character of the kind of institution it is: selective without being elite, academically serious without being research-oriented, organized around the ideal of a broad education in arts and sciences rather than professional preparation. It was, in retrospect, exactly the right institutional context for the kind of education that produces good actors: the study of literature and language and the humanities, combined with the specific training that a theater program provides, in an environment that is small enough that the relationships between students and faculty are genuinely personal.