This Goodly Land

James Agee (November 27, 1909–May 16, 1955)

Other Names Used

• James Rufus Agee: full name

Alabama Connections

• Hale County: researched tenant farmers in 1936

Selected Works

• Agee, James. Permit Me Voyage. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1934.
• Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941. Rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
• Agee, James. 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, James. Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958.
• Agee, James. Agee on Film: Volume Two: Five Film Scripts. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1960. Rpt. Agee on Film: Five Film Scripts. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
• Agee, James. The Collected Poems of James Agee. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

Literary Awards

• Award in Literature, National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1949
• Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 1958, for A Death in the Family

Biographical Information

James Agee was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and spent his early childhood there. His father died in an automobile accident when Agee was a child. Agee attended St. Andrews School in Sewanee, Tenn., where he met his lifelong mentor, Father James Harold Flye. He also attended Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, N.H., where he began writing poetry and short stories. Upon his graduation from Harvard in 1932, he moved to New York City to work for Fortune magazine. In 1936, Fortune sent Agee and photographer Walker Evans to Alabama to gather material for a story about tenant farmers. Although Fortune decided not to publish the article, Agee and Walker turned their material into a book, which was published in 1941 as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

In 1939, Agee began to work for Time magazine, first writing book reviews, then movie reviews. In 1942, he also became the movie columnist for The Nation. Agee believed that film was the most important art form because it came the closest to portraying reality, both physical and psychological. In 1948, he resigned both magazine jobs to write novels and film scripts, including the scripts for The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter. In 1951, Agee suffered the first of many heart attacks, but he continued to write. He died in New York City in 1955, leaving an unfinished manuscript for a semi-autobiographical novel. His editors assembled the pieces of the manuscript and published it in 1957. This novel, A Death in the Family, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958.

Interests and Themes

In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee attempted to document both the lives of Alabama tenant farmers and his own efforts to convey those lives with respect and authenticity. Agee worked in many genres: poetry, novels, short stories, screenplays, and reviews. He tried to blend the portrayal of physical reality with that of psychological reality.

For More Information

Please check your local library for these materials. If items are not available locally, your librarian can help you borrow them through the InterLibrary Loan program. Your librarian can also help you find other information about this author.

There may be more information available through the databases in the Alabama Virtual Library. If you are an Alabama citizen, AVL can be used at your public library or school library media center. You can also get a username and password from your librarian to use AVL at home.

Reference Books

• Agee, James. James Agee Rediscovered: The Journals of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Other New Manuscripts. Ed. Michael A. Lofaro and Hugh Davis. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005.
• Bergreen, Laurence. James Agee: A Life. New York: Dutton, 1984.
• Lofaro, Michael A., ed. James Agee: Reconsiderations. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.
• Spears, Ross, and Jude Cassidy, eds. Agee: His Life Remembered. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985.
• Spiegel, Alan. James Agee and the Legend of Himself: A Critical Study. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998.

Reference Articles

• Childers, James Saxon. "Alabama At Last Lives in Words: The Warrior River Is the Scene of Vines' Novel". Birmingham News-Age Herald 13 May. 1934: 4 Mag.

Reference Web Sites

• Coles, Robert. "James R. Agee 1909-1955". Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. 2002. Tennessee Historical Society. http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=A007.
• Duke-Sylvester, Jennifer. "James Agee". Tennessee Authors: Past & Present. 2003. University of Tennessee Libraries. http://www.lib.utk.edu/refs/tnauthors/authors/agee-j.html.

Location of Papers

• New York Public Library
• University of Tennessee
• University of Texas at Austin