James Rufus Agee, Author

• From James Agee James Rufus Agee (November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize. James Rufus Agee - Books

James Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, at Highland Avenue and 15th Street (renamed James Agee Street in 1999) in what is now the Fort Sanders neighborhood to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler. When Agee was six, his father was killed in an automobile accident. From the age of seven, Agee and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in boarding schools. The most influential of these was located near his mother's summer cottage two miles from Sewanee, Tennessee. Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys was run by Episcopal monks affiliated with the Order of the Holy Cross. It was there that Agee's lifelong friendship with Episcopal priest Father James Harold Flye and his wife began in 1919. As Agee's close friend and spiritual confidant, Flye received many of Agee's most revealing letters.

Agee went to Knoxville High School for the 1924–1925 school year, then traveled with Father Flye to Europe in the summer, when Agee was sixteen. On their return, Agee transferred to a boarding school in New Hampshire, entering the class of 1928 at Phillips Exeter Academy. There he was president of The Lantern Club and editor of the Monthly where his first short stories, plays, poetry and articles were published. Despite barely passing many of his high school courses, Agee was admitted to Harvard University's class of 1932. He was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Advocate and delivered the class ode at his commencement.

Soon after graduation, Agee married Via Saunders on January 28, 1933; they divorced in 1938. Later that same year, he married Alma Mailman.

In 1941 Alma moved to Mexico with their year-old son Joel, to live with Communist writer Bodo Uhse. Agee began living in Greenwich Village with Mia Fritsch, whom he married in 1946. They had two daughters, Teresa and Andrea, and a son John.

In 1951 in Santa Barbara, Agee, a hard drinker and chain-smoker, suffered the first two in a series of heart attacks. Four years later, on May 16, 1955, Agee was in New York City when he suffered a fatal second heart attack. Agee, 45, was in a taxi cab en route to a doctor's appointment, two days before the anniversary of his father's death.[2] He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, New York, property still held by Agee descendants.

Career

After graduation, Agee moved to New York, where he wrote for Fortune and Time magazines, although he is better known for his later film criticism in The Nation. In 1934, he published his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage, with a foreword by Archibald MacLeish.

In the summer of 1936, during the Great Depression, Agee spent eight weeks on assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans, living among sharecroppers in Alabama. While Fortune did not publish his article, Agee turned the material into a book entitled, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). It sold only 600 copies before being remaindered. Agee left Fortune in 1939.

In 1942, Agee became the film critic for Time; at one point, he also reviewed up to six books per week. Together, he and friend Whittaker Chambers ran "the back of the book" for Time.

He left to become film critic for The Nation.

In 1948, Agee quit both magazines to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for Life Magazine about the great silent movie comedians Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon. The article has been credited for reviving Keaton's career. As a freelancer in the 1950s, Agee continued to write magazine articles while working on movie scripts, often with photographer Helen Levitt.

Agee was an ardent champion of Charlie Chaplin's then unpopular film Monsieur Verdoux (1947), since recognized as a film classic. He was also a great admirer of Laurence Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet, especially Henry V. He published three separate reviews of the movie, all of which have been printed in the collection Agee on Film.

Screenwriting

Agee's career as a movie scriptwriter was curtailed by his alcoholism. Nevertheless he is one of the credited screenwriters on two of the most respected films of the 1950s: The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955).

His contribution to Hunter is shrouded in controversy. Some critics have claimed the published script was written by the film's director Charles Laughton. Reports that Agee's screenplay for Hunter was incoherent have been proved false by the 2004 discovery of his first draft, which although 293 pages in length, is scene for scene the film which Laughton directed. While not yet published, the first draft has been read by scholars, most notably Professor Jeffrey Couchman of Columbia University. He credited Agee in the essay, "Credit Where Credit Is Due." Also false were reports that Agee was fired from the film. Laughton renewed Agee's contract and directed him to cut the script in half, which Agee did. Later, apparently at Robert Mitchum's request, Agee visited the set to settle a dispute between the star and Laughton. Letters and documents located in the archive of Agee's agent Paul Kohner bear this out; they were documented by Laughton's biographer Simon Callow, whose BFI book about The Night of the Hunter set this part of the record straight.

In 2008, Jeffrey Couchman published The Night of the Hunter: A Biography of a Film. A scholarly history and analysis of Charles Laughton’s masterpiece, it evaluates the film from many angles. The book also provides the first study of James Agee’s legendary first-draft script.

Legacy

During his lifetime, Agee enjoyed only modest public recognition. Since his death, his literary reputation has grown. In 1957, his novel, A Death in the Family (based on the events surrounding his father's death), was published posthumously and in 1958 won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 2007, Dr. Michael Lofaro published a restored edition of the novel using Agee's original manuscripts. Agee's work had been heavily edited before its original publication by publisher David McDowell.

Agee's reviews and screenplays have been collected in two volumes of Agee on Film. The issues related to The Night of the Hunter attracted controversy.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, ignored on its original publication in 1941, has been placed among the greatest literary works of the 20th century by the New York School of Journalism and the New York Public Library.

The composer Samuel Barber set sections of "Descriptions of Elysium" from Permit Me Voyage to music, creating a song of "Sure On This Shining Night." In addition, he set prose from the "Knoxville" section of A Death in the Family in his work for soprano and orchestra entitled Knoxville: Summer of 1915.

University of Tennessee Libraries' Writer in Residence, RB Morris, wrote a one-man play adapted from the life and works of James Agee, The Man Who Lives Here is Loony,[5] which was performed during UT's "James Agee Celebration" in Spring 2005.

List of works

• 1934 Permit Me Voyage, in the Yale Series of Younger Poets
• 1935 Knoxville: Summer of 1915, prose poem later set to music by Samuel Barber.
• 1941 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families, Houghton Mifflin
• 1951 The Morning Watch, Houghton Mifflin
• 1951 The African Queen, screenplay from C. S. Forester novel
• 1952 Face to Face (The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky segment), screenplay from Stephen Crane story
• 1954 The Night of the Hunter, screenplay from Davis Grubb novel
• 1957 A Death in the Family (posthumous; stage adaptation: All the Way Home)
• 1948 Agee on Film
• 1952 Agee on Film II
• 1972 The Collected Short Prose of James Agee

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Agee

James Rufus Agee (/ˈeɪdʒiː/ AY-jee; November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize.

Early life and education

Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler, at Highland Avenue and 15th Street, which was renamed James Agee Street, in 1909, in what is now the Fort Sanders neighborhood. When Agee was six, his father was killed in an automobile accident. From the age of seven, Agee and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in several boarding schools. The most prominent of these was located near his mother's summer cottage two miles from Sewanee, Tennessee. Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys was run by the monastic Order of the Holy Cross affiliated with the Episcopal Church. It was there that Agee's lifelong friendship with Episcopal priest Father James Harold Flye, a history teacher at St. Andrew's, and his wife Grace Eleanor Houghton began in 1919. As Agee's close friend and mentor, Flye corresponded with him on literary and other topics through life and became a confidant of Agee's soul-wrestling. He published the letters after Agee's death. The New York Times Book Review pronounced The Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (1962 ) as "comparable in importance to Fitzgerald's 'The Crackup' and Thomas Wolfe's letters as a self-portrait of the artist in the modern American scene."

Agee's mother married St. Andrew's bursar Father Erskine Wright in 1924, and the two moved to Rockland, Maine. Agee went to Knoxville High School for the 1924–1925 school year, then traveled with Father Flye to Europe in the summer, when Agee was sixteen. On their return, Agee transferred to a boarding school in New Hampshire, entering the class of 1928 at Phillips Exeter Academy. Soon after, he began a correspondence with Dwight Macdonald.

At Phillips Exeter, Agee was president of The Lantern Club and editor of the Monthly where his first short stories, plays, poetry and articles were published. Despite barely passing many of his high school courses, Agee was admitted to Harvard College's class of 1932, where he lived in Thayer Hall and Eliot House. At Harvard, Agee took classes taught by Robert Hillyer and I. A. Richards; his classmate in those was the future poet and critic Robert Fitzgerald, with whom he would eventually work at Time.[5] Agee was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Advocate and delivered the class ode at his commencement.

Career

After graduation, Agee was hired by Time Inc. as a reporter, and moved to New York City, where he wrote for Fortune magazine from 1932 to 1937, although he is better known for his later film criticism in Time and The Nation. In 1934, he published his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage, with a foreword by Archibald MacLeish.

In the summer of 1936, during the Great Depression, Agee spent eight weeks on assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans, living among sharecroppers in Alabama. While Fortune did not publish his article, Agee turned the material into a book titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). It sold only 600 copies before being remaindered. Another manuscript from the same assignment discovered in 2003, titled Cotton Tenants, is believed to be the essay submitted to Fortune editors. The 30,000 word text, accompanied by photographs by Walker Evans, was published as a book in June 2013. John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in the Summer 2013 issue of BookForum that, "This is not merely an early, partial draft of Famous Men, in other words, not just a different book; it's a different Agee, an unknown Agee. Its excellence should enhance his reputation." A significant difference between the works is the use of original names in Cotton Tenants; Agee assigned fictional names to the subjects of Famous Men in order to protect their identity.

Agee left Fortune in 1937 while working on a book, then, in 1939, he took a book reviewing job at Time, sometimes reviewing up to six books per week; together, he and his friend Whittaker Chambers ran "the back of the book" for Time. In 1941, he became Time's film critic. From 1942-1948, he worked as a film critic for The Nation. Agee was an ardent champion of Charlie Chaplin's then unpopular film Monsieur Verdoux (1947), since recognized as a film classic. He was also a great admirer of Laurence Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet, especially Henry V. Agee on Film (1958) collected his writings of this period. Three writers listed it as one of the best film-related books ever written in a 2010 poll by the British Film Institute.

In 1948, Agee quit his job to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for Life Magazine about the silent movie comedians Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon. The article has been credited for reviving Keaton's career. As a freelancer in the 1950s, Agee continued to write magazine articles while working on movie scripts; he developed a friendship with photographer Helen Levitt.

Screenwriting

In 1947 and 1948, Agee wrote an untitled screenplay for Charlie Chaplin, in which the Tramp survives a nuclear holocaust; posthumously titled The Tramp's New World, the text was published in 2005. The commentary Agee wrote for the 1948 documentary The Quiet One was his first contribution to a film that was completed and released.

Agee's career as a movie scriptwriter was curtailed by his alcoholism. Nevertheless, he is one of the credited screenwriters on two of the most respected films of the 1950s: The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955).

His contribution to Hunter is shrouded in controversy. Some critics have claimed the published script was written by the film's director Charles Laughton. Reports that Agee's screenplay for Hunter was incoherent have been proved false by the 2004 discovery of his first draft, which although 293 pages in length, is scene for scene the film which Laughton directed. However, Laughton seemed to have edited great parts of the script because Agee's original script was too long. While not yet published, the first draft has been read by scholars, most notably Professor Jeffrey Couchman of Columbia University. He credited Agee in the essay, "Credit Where Credit Is Due." Also false were reports that Agee was fired from the film. Laughton renewed Agee's contract and directed him to cut the script in half, which Agee did. Later, apparently at Robert Mitchum's request, Agee visited the set to settle a dispute between the star and Laughton. Letters and documents located in the archive of Agee's agent Paul Kohner bear this out; they were documented by Laughton's biographer Simon Callow, whose BFI book about The Night of the Hunter set this part of the record straight.

Personal life

Soon after graduation from Harvard, he married Olivia Saunders (aka "Via") on January 28, 1933; they divorced in 1938. Later that same year, he married Alma Mailman. They divorced in 1941, and Alma moved to Mexico with their year-old son Joel to live with Communist politician and writer Bodo Uhse.

Agee began living in Greenwich Village with Mia Fritsch, whom he married in 1946. They had two daughters, Julia and Andrea, and a son John. In 1951 in Santa Barbara, Agee, a hard drinker and chain-smoker, suffered a heart attack; on May 16, 1955, Agee was in New York City when he suffered a fatal heart attack in a taxi cab en route to a doctor's appointment. He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, New York, property still held by Agee descendants.

Legacy

During his lifetime, Agee enjoyed only modest public recognition. Since his death, his literary reputation has grown. In 1957, his novel A Death in the Family (based on the events surrounding his father's death) was published posthumously and in 1958 won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 2007, Dr. Michael Lofaro published a restored edition of the novel using Agee's original manuscripts. Agee's work had been heavily edited before its original publication by publisher David McDowell.

Agee's reviews and screenplays have been collected in two volumes of Agee on Film. There is some dispute over the extent of his participation in the writing of The Night of the Hunter.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has grown to be considered Agee's masterpiece. Ignored on its original publication in 1941, the book has since been placed among the greatest literary works of the 20th century by the New York School of Journalism and the New York Public Library. It was the inspiration for the Aaron Copland opera The Tender Land. David Simon, journalist and creator of acclaimed television series The Wire, credited the book with impacting him early in his career and influencing his practice of journalism.

The composer Samuel Barber set sections of "Descriptions of Elysium" from Permit Me Voyage to music, composing a song based on "Sure On This Shining Night." In addition, he set prose from the "Knoxville" section of A Death in the Family in his work for soprano and orchestra titled Knoxville: Summer of 1915. "Sure On This Shining Night" has also been set to music by composers René Clausen, Z. Randall Stroope and Morten Lauridsen.

In late 1979 the filmmaker Ross Spears premiered his film AGEE: A Sovereign Prince of the English Language, which was later nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and was awarded a Blue Ribbon at the 1980 American Film Festival. AGEE featured James Agee's friends, Dwight Macdonald, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Saudek, and John Huston, as well as the three women to whom James Agee had been married. In addition, Father James Harold Flye was a featured interviewee. President Jimmy Carter speaks about his favorite book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

The Man Who Lives Here Is Loony, a one-act play by Knoxville-based songwriter and playwright RB Morris, takes place in a New York apartment during one night in Agee's life. The play has been performed at venues around Knoxville, and at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village.

Bibliography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Agee#Bibliography

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https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/james-agee/

James R. Agee was born in Knoxville on November 27, 1909. His father, Hugh James Agee, was of southern Appalachian yeoman background; his mother, Laura Tyler, came from a family of means and education. The couple also had a younger child, a daughter, Emma. When the boy was six, his father was killed in an automobile accident. Shortly before his tenth birthday, Agee was enrolled in the St. Andrew's boarding school for boys, which was run and staffed by the Episcopalian monastic Order of the Holy Cross near Sewanee. It was there that Agee got to know Father James Harold Flye, a priest and teacher–their many letters would eventually see the light of day. Agee stayed at St. Andrew's until 1924. His mother had taken a house close by, but that year she returned to Knoxville because of her father's failing health, and so her son attended high school there during the school year of 1924-25, after which he was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

While at Exeter, Agee began his writing career in earnest. He published fiction, poetry, and book reviews in the school's literary magazine, The Monthly. Soon enough he was at Harvard (1928), where he wrote for The Advocate–again publishing fiction, poetry, and essays. He became president of The Advocate in 1931, graduated in 1932, and thereafter became a reporter, then staff writer, for Fortune magazine, where between 1932 and 1936 he wrote major pieces on a broad range of subjects including “Housing,” “Sheep and Shuttleworths,” “Strawberries,” “Steel Rails,” “Cockfighting,” “U.S. Ambassadors,” “The American Roadside,” “Drought,” “Williamsburg Restored,” and not least, “T.V.A.” The latter was an important matter to him, one that required that he return to his native state in an effort to understand the (then) hugely ambitious (and controversial) attempt to gain control of the mighty and sometimes aberrant Tennessee River.

Meanwhile, in 1933, he married Olivia Saunders, whom he had met as a Harvard undergraduate. In 1934 his poetry, which he had been publishing since his Exeter years, was collected under the title Permit Me Voyage (Hart Crane's phrase) and published by Yale Press. He was given the Yale Younger Poets award, a most auspicious and distinguished beginning for a twenty-five-year-old man.

In 1936 Fortune commissioned Agee and his photographer friend Walker Evans to do a major study of the rural South's agricultural life–a landmark assignment that would change the very nature of his personal and writing life. In Hale County, Alabama, the two men lived with white tenant farm families and observed carefully their way of life, the work they did, and the manner in which they spent their time. Agee never would do justice to that experience as a writer for Fortune. Instead, he devoted himself to a prolonged literary and documentary “study” of the three families he had come to know best. The result, in the autumn of 1940, was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, an idiosyncratic masterpiece that willfully defies description or categorization. It is a great, sprawling, lyrical, provocative, immensely edifying, soulful, and engaging celebration of humble but worthy farm folk, and too, a mix of social reportage, a narrative rendering of a particular human landscape, moral introspection, spiritual yearning. The book's appearance was untimely–the nation was by then turning its attention away from its social and economic problems in favor of its possible international role in a European war whose stakes were by then high, indeed. The book, too, was stubbornly, at times fiercely sui generis, and so a real challenge to reviewers who were limited by the demands of their work and the confines of the space allotted them. Soon enough the book was out of print, a financial failure for its publisher, Houghton Mifflin.

In 1939 Agee had embarked upon his second marriage, to Alma Mailman; their son Joel Agee (now a writer of both fiction and nonfiction) was born a year later. Agee began writing (unsigned) book reviews around 1941 for Time, and in 1942 he began writing signed film reviews for The Nation. He quickly became a much respected authority on the movies. His generous spirit, keen eye for detail, fluent writing, wonderful sense of humor, and knowing mastery of the techniques that enabled a good “moving picture” earned him a wide, devoted audience of readers.

After the war, in 1946, he entered into a third and final marriage, to Mia Fritsch, which would produce two daughters, Julia and Andrea, and a second son, John. During those last years of the 1940s he moved from writing about film to the writing of film scripts. He wrote the commentary for Helen Levitt's film about a troubled Harlem boy, The Quiet One, and wrote scripts for The Blue Hotel and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (both movies based on Stephen Crane stories). He also worked with John Huston on the script for The African Queen.

In the early 1950s he published The Morning Watch–another return to Tennessee: the story of a boy's unfolding adolescence, his awakening to the world, to his body. He did two more film scripts, one for Noa-Noa, based on Paul Gauguin's diary, and another for The Night of the Hunter. By the middle of the decade, years of heavy smoking, heavy drinking, all-night bouts of exuberant conversations in Manhattan bars, restaurants, apartments–a life lived intensely, sometimes recklessly–had worn down his once tall and powerful body. He developed coronary heart disease, suffered repeated bouts of angina, and on May 16, 1955 (the same day his father was killed, thirty-nine years earlier), he died in a taxicab on his way to see his physician at Manhattan's New York Hospital. At the time he had been completing a novel, A Death in the Family, published posthumously in 1957, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was eventually turned into a successful Broadway play, All the Way Home. The novel turned out to be James Agee's final “visit” to his native Tennessee–the reader is told, in hauntingly evocative prose, of a young boy's loss of his father. The Knoxville of this century's second decade is poignantly, suggestively evoked, and as in Dickens's David Copperfield, family loss, in all its melancholy and perplexity, is chronicled through a child's eyes and ears, his mind and heart and soul. A forty-five-year-old novelist's voice became, finally, one which (calling upon an experience of early sorrow in Tennessee) would teach people across the nation and abroad how the young come to terms with life's disappointments, tragedies, and turmoil.