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“I’ll croak before I write ads or sell bonds—or do anything except write.” James Agee’s father died when he was just six years old, a loss immortalized in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Death in the Family. Three years later, Agee’s mother moved the mourning family from Knoxville, Tennessee, to the campus of St. Andrew’s, an Episcopal boarding school near Sewanee. There, Agee met Father James Harold Flye, who would become his history teacher. Though Agee was just ten, the two struck up an unlikely and enduring friendship, traveling Europe by bicycle and exchanging letters for thirty years, from Agee’s admission to Exeter Academy to his death at forty-five. The intimate letters, collected by Father Flye after Agee’s death, form the most intimate portrait of Agee available, a starkly revealing account of the internal and external life of a tortured twentieth-century genius. Agee candidly shares his struggles with depression, professional failure, and a tumultuous personal life that included three wives and four children. First published in 1962, Letters of James Agee to Father Flye followed the rediscovery of Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the posthumous publication of A Death in the Family, which won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize and became a hit Broadway play and film. The collection sold prolifically throughout the 1960s and ’70s in mass-market editions as a new generation of readers discovered the deep talents of the writer Dwight Macdonald called “the most broadly gifted writer of our American generation.”
By some chance, here they are, all on this earth : ancestors, 1818-1909 -- In the time that I lived there : childhood, 1909-1916 -- The hour of their taking away : death, 1916 -- Tell me who I am : transitions, 1917-1925 -- The stars are wide and alive : writings, 1925-1955 -- One familiar and well-beloved : legacy, 1955-2015 -- From low in the dark : film, 1962-1963
A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographer In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a 400-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama, at the height of the Great Depression. The book shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Critic Lionel Trilling called it the “most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.” The origins of Agee and Evans’s famous collaboration date back to an assignment for Fortune magazine, which sent them to Alabama in the summer of 1936 to report a story that was never published. Some have assumed that Fortune’s editors shelved the story because of the unconventional style that marked Famous Men, and for years the original report was presumed lost. But fifty years after Agee’s death, a trove of his manuscripts turned out to include a typescript labeled “Cotton Tenants.” Once examined, the pages made it clear that Agee had in fact written a masterly, 30,000-word report for Fortune. Published here for the first time, and accompanied by thirty of Walker Evans’s historic photos, Cotton Tenants is an eloquent report of three families struggling through desperate times. Indeed, Agee’s dispatch remains relevant as one of the most honest explorations of poverty in America ever attempted and as a foundational document of long-form reporting. As the novelist Adam Haslett writes in an introduction, it is “a poet’s brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice.”
Novelist, poet, screenwriter, journalist, film critic, and cult hero, James Agee was a man of many talents. This collection examines Agee's achievements from the perspective of family members, friends, and contemporaries to create a multifaceted portrait of a dynamic and influential man. Included are recollections and commentary from Agee's widow, his lifelong friend and teacher Father Flye, his editor David McDowell, and other notables, including John Huston, Andrew Lytle, and Walker Evans, with whom Agee collaborated on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. For this edition, the editors have added new insights from such luminaries as Robert Fitzgerald, Dwight Macdonald, and Frederick Manfred, along with Agee critics Scott Bates, Edward Carlos, James Lee, Edwin M. Sterling, and William Stott. In addition, editor Jeffrey J. Folks has contributed a new preface outlining the state of Agee criticism in the years since the first edition was published in 1974. With liveliness and candor, Remembering James Agee evokes the life and personality of a writer and critic who holds a unique place in American letters.
The first in Nathalie Léger’s acclaimed genre-defying triptych of books about the struggles and obsessions of women artists. Exposition is the first in a triptych of books by the award-winning writer and archivist Nathalie Léger that includes Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress. In each, Léger sets the story of a female artist against the background of her own life and research—an archivist's journey into the self, into the lives that history hides from us. Here, Léger's subject is the Countess of Castiglione (1837–1899), who at the dawn of photography dedicated herself to becoming the most photographed woman in the world, modeling for hundreds of photos, including “Scherzo di Follia,” among the most famous in history. Set long before our own “selfie” age, Exposition is a remarkably modern investigation into the curses of beauty, fame, vanity, and age, as well as the obsessive drive to control and commodify one's image.
A Study Guide for James Agee's "A Death in the Family," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
"In The Making of James Agee, Hugh Davis takes a comprehensive look at Agee's career, showing the interrelatedness of his concerns as a writer. A full view of Agee's oeuvre, Davis argues, illuminates its deeply political nature and reveals a debt to various sources, particularly European surrealism, that have been little noted by previous Agee scholars." "Davis challenges the view of Agee that has persisted since his death - that he is best understood primarily as a romantic individualist at odds with convention and the literary mainstream - and argues that this myth was largely constructed by friends and associates who were so immersed in the tenets of modernism that they distorted Agee's work (and aesthetic intent) in an attempt to purify it in modernist terms. In revealing a writer of far greater complexity than the myth allows, Davis explores, for example, the leftist poetry that Agee wrote in the 1930s, which was almost completely suppressed by his editors. He also throws a fresh light on Agee's collaboration with photographer Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and reevaluates A Death in the Family in light of recent scholarship that has produced an almost entirely new version of the novel, one much closer to Agee's original intentions."--BOOK JACKET.
[The author] had a passion for art in all its aspects, but it was the new art of the movies that was his greatest inspiration as a critic. [This book] has long been recognized as the single most influential American book about movies. Witty, probing, lacerating his moral criticisms, eloquent in his admiration of filmmakers from Charlie Chaplin to John Huston, [the author] is a critic who engages the reader no matter what subject he is writing about.-Back cover.