James Agee

The life of James Agee (b. 1909–d. 1955) spanned the first half of the twentieth century, so that his profuse and varied works engaged international modernism in many ways that evolved as regional and national responses to it. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Agee’s childhood was suddenly altered at the age of six by the unexpected death of his father in 1916. His mother later moved her young family to Sewanee, Tennessee, where he was enrolled in an Anglican boarding school. After his mother remarried, Agee was sent north to Phillips Exeter Academy in 1925 to prepare for Harvard, where he was enrolled in 1928. Although Agee’s academic progress was unremarkable, his literary development thrived as editor of the Harvard Advocate. After graduation in 1932, Agee moved to New York and took a writing post at the newly launched Fortune magazine. The young writer’s first book was Permit Me Voyage (1934), a volume in the Yale Younger Poets Series. In 1936 an assignment at Fortune led him to the cotton belt of Alabama in the company of photographer Walker Evans, a sojourn that slowly evolved into their hybrid classic, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). The book evoked little response on publication, and Agee returned to journalism, mostly book and film reviewing at Time. He faced a number of personal and professional challenges during the war years and after, including health problems and two divorces, as well as career dead ends and frustrated literary ambitions. Over these decades, Agee’s sporadic counseling sessions led him into autobiographical fiction, one aspect of which was his short novel The Morning Watch (1951). In later life, Agee turned toward film writing, working on several screenplays, notably The African Queen (1951), and spending more time in California than New York. Years of self-neglect finally caught up with him, however, and Agee died of a heart attack in 1955. At his death, all three of his books were out of print, and he enjoyed only a modest reputation as a writer about film. Appreciation of his career and canon soon developed in the second half of the century, however, starting with the posthumous publication of his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Death in the Family (1957). A second edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men followed in 1960, and appreciation of Agee’s work grew with the publication of his collected works and innovative criticism. By his centennial in 2009, Agee was generally recognized as a significant figure in American letters during the first half of the twentieth century.