James Agee

Walker Evans

Agee's colleague at Time in the 1940s, John Hersey, writes a major evaluation of Agee's work and the Agee legend in a new introduction to this literary classic. 64 pages of photos.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Agee's portrayal of the sweetness of day-to-day familial relations are powerful and poignant. His masterfully drawn characters take on a haunting reality in this vivid recreation of life -- and sudden death.

A Death in the Family

"In my opinion, [Agee's] column is the most remarkable regular event in American journalism today."--W. H. Auden James Agee was passionately involved with the movies throughout his life. A master of both fiction and nonfiction, he wrote about film in clean, smart prose as the reviewer for Time magazine and as a columnist for The Nation. Agee was particularly perceptive about the work of his friend John Huston and recognized the artistic merit of certain B films such as The Curse of the Cat People and other movies produced by Val Lewton.

Criticism and Comment on the Movies

Agee on Film

Ailede bir ölüm

Death in the Family, A

Permit Me Voyage

Three Tenant Families

Collects some of the writing of James Agee, focusing on his film reviews, book reviews, and the screenplay of "The Night of the Hunter."

Agee on Film / Uncollected Film Writing / The Night of the Hunter / Journalism and Film Reviews

James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism (LOA #160)

The Morning Watch

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.”

Three Families

Cotton Tenants

A Mother's Tale

With James Agee, Jr.'s second work of fiction, Mask City, he presents a world where two siblings, Thomas and Lacy Farthur, are thrust out of their seemingly harmless world into a society they formerly didn't know existed: an underground domain where the common adage, "A person is not a person without a mask," is exploited in the most dreadful manner. Thomas and Lacy, through a series of dramatic and horrendous undertakings, eventually find themselves challenging the system that took everything away from them. This work is an exploration of friendship, trust, redemption, and discovering purpose.

Mask City

Helen Levitt

A Way of Seeing

Excerpt from Letters of James Agee to Father Flye Yet as the course of these letters proclaims, no Ameri can writer, not even Henry James, ever had a more explicit, precocious, and God-fearing sense of a literary vocation. It is hard to be precise about just what this means, but covering pages with sentences is certainly at the heart of it; that, and a need (a need greater than any talent or luck or ambition) to use language to incarnate a part of oneself which no other medium, including one's own ﬂesh, will ever be adequate to. In varying degree, there is also the delight of playing the literary game, of making shapes with words, putting oblongs on squares, as Virginia Woolf has described it. In all of these senses, james Agee had a marked voca tion for literature. The earliest of these letters, written when he was not quite sixteen, mentions a story and two or three poems he is having published in the Exeter Monthly. In the very last letter, written a few days before his death, he speaks of taking the summer off to finish my book. In between, over a period of thirty years, there is hardly a let ter in which his calling is not mentioned or implied. And then listen to this, written in November, 1930, when he was twenty - one and still at Harvard. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (Classic Reprint)

Agee on Film: Five film scripts: Noa, Noa, The African queen, The night of the hunter, The bride comes to Yellow Sky, The blue hotel

Brooklyn è

"From 1942 to 1948, James Agee wrote rather voluminous move reviews for Time and The Nation at a time when motion pictures captured wide swaths of the viewing public. This fifth volume in the Works of James Agee series includes Maland's historical introduction and his textual introduction as well as Agee's reviews from Time, The Nation, other published film criticism, and unpublished articles. Agee's Time reviews have never been published in their entirety, and early reviews from Agee's time at Exeter Academy are also included"--

Reviews, Essays, and Manuscripts

Complete Film Criticism

Paul Ashdown

James Agee, Selected Journalism

“Agee’s prose poem captures the textural variety of Brooklyn in language that bears reading aloud for its lilt, melody, and pleasingly pungent vocabulary.” —Booklist (starred review) For the first time in book form—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Foreword by Jonathan Lethem, author Motherless Brooklyn In 1939, James Agee was assigned to write an article on Brooklyn for a special issue of Fortune on New York City. The draft was rejected for “creative differences,” and remained unpublished until it appeared in Esquire in 1968 under the title “Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes.” Crossing the borough from the brownstone heights over the Brooklyn Bridge out through backstreet neighborhoods like Flatbush, Midwood, and Sheepshead Bay that roll silently to the sea, Agee captured in 10,000 remarkable words, the essence of a place and its people. Propulsive, lyrical, jazzy, and tender, its pitch-perfect descriptions endure even as Brooklyn changes; Agee’s essay is a New York classic. Resonant with the rhythms of Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, and Thomas Wolfe, it takes its place alongside Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City as a great writer’s love-song to Brooklyn and alongside E. B. White’s Here Is New York as an essential statement of the place so many call home. “Agee’s rhapsodically detailed essay/prose poem is a Whitmanessque catalog, evoking a Brooklyn of ordinary people.” —Berkshire Eagle “Strikingly successful in uncovering America’s Brooklyn, its neighborhoods and its people . . . the book is startlingly beautiful.” —The Brooklyn Rail “Agee is a wonderfully poetic writer, and he weaves a beautiful portrait of the borough, covering the people and places in every corner of Brooklyn’s seventy-one miles” —Park Slope Reader

James Agee

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