AGEE, James (Rufus) 1909-1955

PERSONAL: Born November 27, 1909, in Knoxville, TN; died of a heart attack, May 16, 1955, in New York, NY; son of Hugh James and Laura (Tyler) Agee; married Olivia Saunders, January 28, 1933 (divorced); married Alma Mailman, 1939 (divorced); married Mia Fritsch, 1946; children: (second marriage) Joel; (third marriage) Julia Teresa. Education: Harvard University, A.B., 1932.

CAREER: Poet, novelist, screenwriter, and reviewer. Staff member of Fortune magazine, c. 1930s. Actor in motion pictures, including The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, 1953.

AWARDS, HONORS: Literary Award from American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1949; nomination for Academy Award for best screenplay adaptation, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1951, for The African Queen; Pulitzer Prize for fiction (posthumous), 1957, for A Death in the Family.

WRITINGS:

Permit Me Voyage (poetry), foreword by Archibald MacLeish, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1934.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, photographs by Walker Evans, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1941, new edition, with an introduction by John Hersey, 1969, enlarged edition, 2000.

The Quiet One (documentary), Museum of Modern Art, 1949.

The Morning Watch (novel), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1951.

A Death in the Family (novel), McDowell, Obolensky, 1957, prologue published separately as Knoxville, Summer of 1915, Caliban Press, 1986, reprinted, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1998.

Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments, McDowell, Obolensky, 1958, published as Agee on Film: Criticisms and Comments on the Movies, introduction by David Denby, Modern Library (New York, NY), 2000.

Agee on Film, Volume 2: Five Film Scripts (includes The African Queen, wirtten with John Huston and adapted from C. S. Forester's novel, United Artists, 1951; The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, adapted from a story by Stephen Crane and included in Face to Face, R.K.O., 1953; White Mane, Rembrandt Films/Contemporary Films, 1953; The Night of the Hunter, adapted from Davis Grubb's novel, United Artists, 1955; and Green Magic, Italian Film Exports, 1955), McDowell, Obolensky, 1960.

Letters of James Agee to Father James Flye, edited by James H. Flye, Brazilier (New York, NY), 1962, 2nd edition, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1971.

Four Early Stories by James Agee (contains "Boys Will Be Boys," "Death in the Desert," "They That Sow in Sorrow Shall Reap," and "You, Andrew Volstead"), compiled by Elena Harap, etchings by Keith Achepohl, Cummington Press, 1964.

The Collected Short Prose of James Agee, edited by Robert Fitzgerald, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1968.

The Collected Poems of James Agee, edited by Robert Fitzgerald, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1968.

The Last Letter of James Agee to Father Flye, Godine (Boston, MA), 1969.

Selected Journalism, edited by Paul Ashdown, University of Tennessee Press (Knoxville, TN), 1985.

(Author of poems) Dan Welcher, Evening Scenes (printed music), T. Presser (Bryn Mawr, PA), 1986.

Agee: Selected Literary Documents, edited by Victor A. Kramer, Whitston (Troy, NY), 1996.

James Agee: Literary Notebooks and Other Manuscripts, edited by Michael A. Lofaro and Hugh Davis, James Agee Press (Ridgewood, NJ), 2002.

James Agee Rediscovered: The Notebooks for "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," and Other New Manuscripts, edited by Michael A. Lofaro and Hugh Davis, University of Tennessee Press (Knoxville, TN) 2004.

Work by Agee included in Helen Levitt's A Way of Seeing, Duke University Press, 1989. Contributor of scripts to television program Omnibus, NBC-TV. Book reviewer for Time, 1938-48; film reviewer for Nation, 1942-48. Contributor to periodicals, including Botteghe Oscure, Films, and Politics.

ADAPTATIONS: A Death in the Family was adapted by Tad Mosel as the play All the Way Home in 1960 and by Robert W. Lenski in 2001 as a screenplay produced for PBS Masterpiece Theatre's American Collection, directed by Gil Cates; All the Way Home and passages from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men were adapted as an opera by William Mayer in 1983 and recorded on CD as A Death in the Family, Albany Records, 2000; "Knoxville, Summer of 1915" (prologue to A Death in the Family) was set to music by Samuel Barber; various poems were set to music by David Diamond as The Fall: A Cycle of Nine Songs for Voice and Piano, King's Crown Music Press, 1983; "In Memory of My Father," "The Storm," and "A Lullaby" were set to music by Dan Welcher as Songs for High Voice, Flute, Clarinet, Piano, Percussion, Violin, and Violoncello, T. Presser, 1986.

SIDELIGHTS: James Agee is described as a wide-ranging, rather self-destructive writer who distinguished himself in poetry, screenplays, and both fiction and nonfiction before dying prematurely at age forty-five. Kenneth Seib, in his volume James Agee: Promise and Fulfillment, described Agee as "a versatile and accomplished artist whose mind played freely over all possible media of expression and whose ability with the English language was exceeded by none of his contemporaries."

Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1909, and when he reached age six his father died in an automobile accident. His father's death eventually inspired Agee's autobiographical novel A Death in the Family, which ranks among the author's finest works. In his youth Agee attended an Episcopalian boarding school, where he befriended cleric James Harold Flye—his correspondence with Flye was eventually published as Letters of James Agee to Father James Flye. Agee then entered Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he developed an enthusiasm for writing. Later, at Harvard University, he showed promise in both poetry and prose. While at Harvard he also became acquainted with visiting instructor I. A. Richards, a literary critic whose notions of narrative immediacy would powerfully influence Agee's own work.

After graduating from Harvard, Agee obtained work as a writer for Fortune business magazine. According to W. M. Frohock in The Novel of Violence in America, Agee's Fortune writings "revealed a craftsman who could lose himself, with complete detachment, in any ephemeral piece of writing which happened to challenge his skill."

The steady income from Fortune enabled Agee to concentrate on his poetry. In 1934 he issued Permit Me Voyage, a volume that reveals his flair for both stylistic precision and American subject matter. In his introduction to Permit Me Voyage, poet and fellow Fortune writer Archibald MacLeish commented on Agee's "delicate and perceptive ear" and acknowledged his "technical apprenticeship successfully passed." Horace Gregory, in his Poetry review of Permit Me Voyage, tempered MacLeish's assessment, but nonetheless acknowledged that "MacLeish's general enthusiasm for James Agee's work is visibly justified," and he called Agee "a genuine poet."

With Permit Me Voyage, Agee had made an impressive beginning to his literary career. But he would not yet leave Fortune, even though the publication's ardent pro-capitalism was contrary to the beliefs of the leftist Agee. It was through Fortune that Agee came to write one of his greatest works, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Fortune teamed Agee with photographer Walker Evans in 1936, sending the pair to Alabama to do a report on tenant farmers there. The duo's work provided enough material for a sizeable volume and provided a sympathetic look at a way of life rife with suffering, squalor, and economic hardship.

While Evans, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, documents the tenant farmers with moving, objective photographs, Agee evokes that same way of life in quasi-fictional pieces incorporating shifting narratives and nonchronological episodes. Furthermore, Agee includes comments relating his own concerns in rendering his subjects. "What this technique achieves," Robert E. Burkholder wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "is the feeling that the writer is working from a sincere concern for the peole with whom he has lived and labored."

Upon publication in 1941, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—with Evans's harshly realistic photographs and Agee's technically ambitious prose style—failed to engage an American public increasingly preoccupied with World War II. More recently the book has received recognition not only as a stirring portrait of farm life but as an incisive expression of the artist's dilemma in fashioning that portrait. William Stott, for instance, wrote in his Documentary Expression and Thirties America that "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is confessional in a way no documentary had been" and that "Agee's extraordinary participation in the narrative … set the book apart from other documentary writing of the thirties." An expanded edition of the book, included sixty-four new archival photographs, was published in 2000. Upon reading the new edition, a Creative Review contributor noted that the book remains a classic and commented, "Stylistically, Agee veers from the compact sections describing with minute fascination the physical environment and the waking, sleeping, eating, working, social lives of his hosts, to long, meandering almost stream-ofconsciousness passages, expressing his personal response to the situation of the sharecroppers."

While still at work on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in the late 1930s, Agee began writing book reviews for Time, and a few years later he became a film critic for Nation. His film reviews are distinguished by what Manny Farber, writing in New Leader, deemed "an excessive richness." Agee's reviews have been collected in Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments and Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies. In a review of the latter volume for Library Journal, Michael Rogers simply stated, "Film heads will jump on this."

In the 1940s, particularly after leaving Fortune, Agee supported himself largely through his various magazine writings, including film reviewing. He eventually decided to undertake his own film work, and in 1951 he collaborated with filmmaker John Huston on the script for The African Queen. The popular drama tells the story of the unlikely bond that develops between a prim missionary and a profane ship captain in German-occupied Africa. The film, which Agee and Huston adapted from C. S. Forester's novel, received Academy Award nominations for screenplay and direction.

In 1951 Agee also released a modest novel, The Morning Watch, about an introspective boy who is preoccupied with spiritual matters and is consequently ostracized by his fellow students. By killing a snake the youthful protagonist gains a measure of acceptance from his peers, but also forfeits a measure of saintliness. "Throughout The Morning Watch," Victor A. Kramer noted in Renascence, "Agee is most concerned with evoking the complex emotions of particular imagined moments."

During 1951, as Agee worked on The African Queen and issued The Morning Watch, he suffered a heart attack; others followed the following year, prompting his doctors to advise Agee to temper his alcohol intake and his fast-paced lifestyle. For many months afterward, Agee's health seemed to improve. He continued his work as a screenwriter, penning the short film The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, based on a screenplay he adapted from a story by Stephen Crane. The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, which is included in the two-part film Face to Face, concerns a group of citizens in a western town. Among the residents is a kindly exconvict, played by Agee.

In 1955 Agee was again plagued with heart attacks, sometimes several a day. In early March of that year he endured a particularly painful series of attacks, and died in New York City on May 16, 1955, while riding in a taxi cab. His death came the same year as the release of The Night of the Hunter, a film Agee had adapted from Davis Grubb's novel. The movie, directed by noted actor Charles Laughton and starring Lillian Gish and Robert Mitchum, focuses on two children who are terrorized by a psychopath posing as a preacher.

At his death Agee left incomplete an autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family. In the novel, a family much like Agee's own must contend with the father's untimely death in an automobile accident. Like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family is narratively complex, focusing on both the death itself and on the son's memories of his father. Robert E. Burkholder, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, observed that "the reader is aware of two levels of time working concurrently in the novel." Burkholder noted that "much of the action in A Death in the Family is created by an exploration of tensions." He added: "At the center of all these tensions is young Rufus Follet, whom we are led to believe is the narrator…. His disguise is that of a young boy, but he is actually a fully-grown and developed artist who will not be limited by speaking through an adolescent persona." The revelation of the narrator as an adult renders A Death in Family a tale not just about death, and a family's consequent reactions to it, but about maturation and the emotional growth of an individual through experiences both good and bad.

A Death in the Family, though incomplete, nonetheless won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and was adapted into both a play and a film airing on the Public Broadcasting System's Masterpiece Theatre's American Collection series in 2001. In the years since his death, other of Agee's writings have appeared in print. A collection of screenplays was published in 1960, followed by volumes of poems, short prose, and journalism. With these posthumous publications came recognition for Agee not only as an accomplished stylist and innovative storyteller but also as a profound artist whose works poignantly reflect the human condition. As Victor A. Kramer noted in his book James Agee, "the quality of [Agee's] moral vision is a final reason why [his] works have enduring value. He was a writer for whom there was little separation between moral and aesthetic judgments. There was never a question of anything being right if it did not honor the human spirit."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Agee, James, Permit Me Voyage, foreword by Archibald Macleish, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1934.

Barson, Alfred, A Way of Seeing: A Critical Study of James Agee, University of Massachusetts Press, 1972.

Bergreen, Laurence, James Agee: A Life, Dutton (New York, NY), 1984.

Boger, Astrid, Documenting Lives: James Agee's and Walker Evans's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," P. Lang (New York, NY), 1994.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 2: American Novelists since World War II, 1978, Volume 26: American Screenwriters, 1984.

Doty, Mark, Tell Me Who I Am: James Agee's Search for Selfhood, Louisiana State University Press, 1981.

Frohock, W. M., The Novel of Violence in America, revised edition, Southern Methodist University Press (Austin, TX), 1957, pp. 212-230.

Hynes, Samuel, Landmarks of American Writing, edited by Hennig Cohen, Basic Books (New York, NY), pp. 328-330.

Kramer, Victor A., James Agee, Twayne (New York, NY), 1975.

Larsen, Erling, James Agee, University of Minnesota Press, 1971.

Lowe, James, The Creative Process of James Agee, Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

Macdonald, Dwight, Against the American Grain, Random House (New York, NY), 1962, pp. 143-159.

Madden, David, editor, Remembering James Agee, Louisiana State University Press, 1974.

Moreau, Genevieve, The Restless Journey of James Agee, translated by Miriam Kleiger and Morty Schiff, Morrow (New York, NY), 1977.

Seib, Kenneth, James Agee: Promise and Fulfillment, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1969.

Snyder, John J., James Agee: A Study of His Film Criticism, Arno Press (New York, NY), 1977.

Stott, William, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1973, pp. 290-314.

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1978, Volume 19, 1986.

periodicals

America, December 21, 1991, pp. 490-491.

Antioch Review, winter, 1999, Bruce Jackson, "The Deceptive Anarchy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," p.38.

Chicago Tribune Books, April 30, 1989, pp. 1, 4.

Commonweal, September 12, 1958, pp. 591-592.

Creative Review, July, 2001, "Let Us Praise a Famous Book," p. 68.

Library Journal, February 15, 2000, review of Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies, p. 203.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 12, 1986.

New Leader, December 8, 1958.

New Republic, December 9, 1957, pp. 25-26; December 1, 1958, pp. 18-19; August 13, 1962, pp. 23-24.

Poetry, April, 1935, pp. 48-51; September, 1969.

Publishers Weekly, January 24, 2000, "Let Us Now Praise Evans and Agee," p. 307.

Renascence, summer, 1975, pp. 221-230.

Rolling Stone, March 23, 1989.

Time, April 23, 1951, pp. 119-120.

Village Voice, August 29, 1989, pp. 58-60.

Western Humanities Review, autumn, 1961, pp. 359-367.*