James Agee

James Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. He first began writing poetry and short stories while attending Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, N.H. After graduating from Harvard in 1932, he began working for Fortune magazine in New York City. He was sent to Alabama for eight weeks with photographer Walker Evans to gather material for a story about tenant farmers in 1936, but the material turned into the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men instead of a magazine article. Agee began writing reviews for Time magazine in 1939, and he became a movie columnist for The Nation in 1942. In 1948, he quit his magazine jobs to pursue novel writing and screenwriting. His most prominent screenplays were The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter. He died in New York City in 1955. His posthumously published semi-autobiographical novel A Death in the Family was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958.

Permit Me Voyage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941. Rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

A Death in the Family. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1957. Rpt. as A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007.

Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958.

Agee on Film: Volume Two: Five Film Scripts. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1960.

The Collected Poems of James Agee. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

James Agee wrote poetry, short stories, novels, and screenplays. He was interested in both the physical and the psychological.

Alabama Authors of the 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Beverley Park Rilett, http://AlabamaAuthors.org

AL Author Collection

Agee, James, “James Agee,” Alabama Authors of the 19th & 20th Centuries, accessed September 19, 2024, https://alabamaauthors.org/items/show/531.