Agee, James

Agee, James ā´jē [key], 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 forFortunemagazine, a book reviewer and movie critic forTime(1939–48), and a film critic forThe Nation(1942–48). During the 1950s he was a film scriptwriter, e.g.,The African Queen(with JohnHuston, 1951) andThe Night of the Hunter(1955), and also wrote for television. Agee's first major book isLet 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 WalkerEvans. His second major book, and probably best-known work, is the autobiographical and posthumously published novelA 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 includeThe Morning Watch(1954), a novella with strong autobiographical elements,;Agee on Film(2 vol., 1958–60), a collection of reviews, comments, and scripts;詹姆斯·阿吉的父亲Flye书信(1962), a collection of letters to a former teacher;Collected Poems(1968); andCollected Short Prose(1969).

See his collected works, ed. by M. Sragow (2 vol., 2005); M. A. Lofaro, ed.,A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text(2008); 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), A. Spiegel (1998), and H. Davis (2008).

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