Agee, James (ā`jē), 1909–55, American writer, b. Knoxville, Tenn., grad. Harvard, 1932. He soon joined the literary and journalistic life of New York City, becoming (1932) a writer for Fortune magazine, a book reviewer and movie critic for Time (1939–48), and a film critic for The Nation (1942–48). During the 1950s he was a film scriptwriter, e.g., The African Queen (with John Huston Walter Huston, 1884–1950, American actor, b. Toronto, Ont. A character actor, he starred in Kurt Weill's Knickerbocker Holiday (1938). His films include Dodsworth (1936), All That Money Can Buy (1941), and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
..... Click the link for more information. , 1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955), and also wrote for television. Agee's first major book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a prose commentary on the life of tenant farmers in the South in the 1930s with accompanying photographs by Walker Evans Evans, Walker, 1903–75, American photographer, b. St. Louis. Evans began his photographic career in 1928. His studies of Victorian architecture and his photographs of the rural South during the Great Depression, made for the Farm Security Administration, are
..... Click the link for more information. . His second major book, and probably best-known work, is the autobiographical and posthumously published novel A Death in the Family (1957; Pulitzer Prize), which recounts in poetic prose the tragic impact of a man's death on his wife and family. Agee's other works include The Morning Watch (1954), a novella with strong autobiographical elements,; Agee on Film (2 vol., 1958–60), a collection of reviews, comments, and scripts; Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (1962), a collection of letters to a former teacher; Collected Poems (1968); and Collected Short Prose (1969).

Bibliography

See his collected works, ed. by M. Sragow (2 vol., 2005); biographies by G. Moreau (1977) and L. Bergreen (1984); R. Spears and J. Cassidy, ed., Agee: His Life Remembered (1985); studies by P. H. Ohlin (1966), A. G. Barson (1972), V. A. Kramer (1975), M. A. Doty (1981), M. A. Lofaro (1992), J. Lowe (1994), and A. Spiegel (1998).

Agee, James

(born Nov. 27, 1909, Knoxville, Tenn., U.S.—died May 16, 1955, New York, N.Y.) U.S. poet and novelist. Agee attended Harvard University. In the 1930s and '40s, film reviews for Time and The Nation made him a pioneer in serious film criticism. His lyrical Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), with photographs by Walker Evans, documents the daily lives of poverty-stricken Alabama sharecroppers. After 1948 Agee worked mainly as a screenwriter, notably on The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). He is best known for his autobiographical novel A Death in the Family (1957, Pulitzer Prize).

Agee, James (Rufus) (1909–55) writer, poet; born in Knoxville, Tenn. He attended St. Andrews School, Tenn., (1914–24), Phillips Exeter (1925–28), and Harvard (1928–32). Based in New York City, he worked for several periodicals, and is known for his study of tenant farmers in Alabama, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), co-authored with the photographer Walker Evans. He is also known for poetry, film scripts, such as The African Queen (1952), and his novels, notably A Death in the Family (1957).