AGEE, JAMES

James Rufus Agee (November 27, 1909–May 16, 1955) was a gifted man of letters who in his brief but intense life left an indelible touch on a variety of literary forms: poetry, novels, film criticism, screenplays, essays, and journalism. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Agee was one of America's best film critics (for Time and The Nation, 1941–1948), and the first to raise the mechanics of weekly reviewing to the level of prose art. His scripts for such films as The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955) were generally judged superior to their novelistic sources. His posthumous autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), which won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, remains a much-loved period evocation of southern Americana, as well as an aching memoir of parents, children, and the negotiation of loss. Arguably, his greatest achievement was a product of his late youth, the Depression-era classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), co-authored with the photographer Walker Evans. Part anatomy of the impoverished conditions surrounding a tenant farmer's life, part poetic and metaphysical inquiry into the mysteries of existence, part intimate confession of the author's search for his aesthetic identity and family roots, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book like no other. Admittedly unclassifiable, it is without doubt one of the most brilliant and original junctures of image and text in the annals of mixed media creation.

In the summer of 1936, Fortune magazine sent Agee and Evans to the South "to prepare an article on cotton tenantry in the United States." The coauthors spent approximately six weeks on assignment, much of the time actually living with three tenant families in Hale County, Alabama. Agee meant for the resulting text of almost five hundred pages and Evans's thirty-one plates (later expanded to sixty-two) to be understood as analogous but very different views of the same subject. Accordingly, the images were lucid, surgical, and selfless, while the prose was turbulent, extravagant, and self-reflexive. Evans's models were connoisseurs of fact, the photographers Eugène Atget and Matthew Brady; Agee's were visionary poets, William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, and William Blake. Occasionally self-indulgent, the author's language is frequently breathtaking in its intellectual passion, moral force, and near holographic reproduction of the physical reality. Equally characteristic is the way Agee refuses to view the farmer as a ready-made protest symbol, or in any way as an applicant for the reader's pity or patronization. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men remains honorably distinct in the literature of the Depression in its vision of the imperiled family as exalted in tragedy, inheritors of a moral aristocracy, and virtual gods in ruins.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agee, James. Agee on Film, Vol. 1: Reviews and Comments. 1958. Reprint, 1983.

Agee, James. A Death in the Family. 1957. Reprint, 1969.

Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. 1941. Reprint, 1960.

Bergreen, Lawrence. James Agee: A Life. 1984.

Spiegel, Alan. James Agee and the Legend of Himself: A Critical Study. 1998.

Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties America. 1973.