James Agee

Who Was James Agee?

James Agee was one of the most restlessly gifted American writers of the twentieth century — a poet, journalist, novelist, and screenwriter whose brief life produced work of extraordinary moral intensity. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he was shaped early by loss: his father died in a car accident when Agee was six, a wound that would inform his writing for the rest of his life. Educated at Phillips Exeter and Harvard, he joined Fortune magazine in the 1930s and in 1936 was sent with photographer Walker Evans to document the lives of three Alabama sharecropper families.

The resulting book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), defied every convention of documentary journalism. Agee was tormented by the moral problem of the project itself: the violence of reducing suffering human beings to subject matter, the inadequacy of any prose to render the full weight of a human life. The book is as much a confession as a document.

His novel A Death in the Family, published posthumously and awarded the Pulitzer Prize, returned to the loss of his father with a lyricism that placed the ordinary moment within a frame large enough to carry the weight of mortality. Agee died of a heart attack at forty-five, leaving behind a body of work that is a prolonged meditation on what human beings owe each other simply by virtue of being human.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men — 1941 — with Walker Evans
• A Death in the Family — 1957 — Pulitzer Prize, posthumous
• The Morning Watch — 1951
• Agee on Film — 1958 — collected criticism