A short life of the author
James Rufus Agee (27 November 1909 – 16 May 1955) was an American novelist, poet, journalist, screenwriter, and film critic whose work — scattered across genres and published largely after his death — includes two of the masterpieces of twentieth-century American prose: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a documentary account of Alabama sharecropper families during the Depression, and A Death in the Family (1957), a novel about a child’s experience of his father’s sudden death. He died of a heart attack at forty-five, leaving behind a body of work that is brilliant, incomplete, and haunted by the sense of genius unable to find its proper form.
Life
Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. His father, Hugh James Agee, died in a car accident when James was six — the event that became the subject of A Death in the Family. He was educated at St. Andrew’s School (an Episcopal boarding school in Tennessee, run by an order of monks) and at Phillips Exeter Academy, before attending Harvard, where he edited the Advocate and published his first poetry.
After Harvard, he joined Fortune magazine and later Time, where he worked as a journalist while struggling with alcohol, insomnia, and the conviction that journalism was destroying his talent. He wrote film criticism for The Nation (1942–1948) — some of the finest film criticism ever written — and worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, contributing scripts for John Huston’s The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955).
He was married three times and had four children. His alcoholism and chain-smoking contributed to his early death from a heart attack in a New York taxicab.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)
In the summer of 1936, Fortune sent Agee and the photographer Walker Evans to Alabama to document the lives of white sharecropper families during the Depression. The resulting work — which Fortune rejected as unpublishable — is one of the most extraordinary books of the twentieth century: part documentary, part prose poem, part moral and philosophical meditation on the ethics of representing poverty.
Agee refuses the conventions of documentary journalism. He describes the sharecroppers’ houses, possessions, food, and daily routines with an obsessive, almost hallucinatory precision — the texture of a wooden wall, the arrangement of objects on a mantelpiece, the smell of a room — that transforms documentary into something approaching religious contemplation. He is tormented by the ethical implications of his task: what right does a privileged writer have to enter these people’s lives, describe their poverty, and publish it for a middle-class audience?
The book was a commercial failure on publication (it sold fewer than 600 copies) but was rediscovered in the 1960s and is now recognised as one of the essential American books.
A Death in the Family (1957)
Agee’s autobiographical novel — assembled posthumously by editors from an unfinished manuscript — tells the story of a Knoxville family in 1915: the father, Jay Follet, is killed in a car accident, and the novel follows the impact of his death on his wife, his children (particularly the six-year-old Rufus), and the extended family.
The novel is written in prose of extraordinary tenderness and sensory precision — the opening passage, “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” (originally published separately), is one of the most beautiful pages in American literature. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958.
Film Criticism
Agee’s reviews for The Nation — collected in Agee on Film (1958) — are the finest body of American film criticism before Pauline Kael. He wrote about movies with the seriousness and the prose style of a literary critic, and his reviews of Chaplin, Huston, and Italian neorealism remain essential reading.
The Agee Problem: Genius Without a Form
Agee’s career is a study in brilliant incompletion. He wrote poetry, journalism, documentary prose, fiction, film criticism, and screenplays — and produced work of the highest quality in each — but never consolidated his achievement into the sustained body of work his talent seemed to promise. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a masterpiece but sui generis, unrepeatable. A Death in the Family is a masterpiece but unfinished. The film criticism is superb but occasional. The screenplays are collaborative. The poetry is accomplished but minor.
The problem was partly temperamental — Agee was a perfectionist who could not stop revising, a man who wrote thousands of pages of letters but left his major works incomplete — and partly structural. He came of age in the 1930s, when the dominant literary modes were social realism and leftist engagement, but his sensibility was essentially lyrical and religious: he wanted to write about the sacredness of ordinary experience, not about politics. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men succeeds because it transforms a political assignment into a spiritual exercise; the tension between the magazine’s expectations and Agee’s temperament produces the book’s extraordinary energy. Without that productive friction, he struggled to find a form adequate to his vision.
Robert Fitzgerald, who edited A Death in the Family, compared Agee to Hart Crane and F. Scott Fitzgerald — men of immense gifts who destroyed themselves before their work was done. The comparison is exact. What survives is enough to establish Agee as one of the essential American writers of the century — and enough to make the incompletion genuinely tragic rather than merely sad.
Collecting Agee
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941, Houghton Mifflin) in first edition is a major rarity — fewer than 600 copies of the first printing survive — and brings $5,000–$20,000. A Death in the Family (1957, McDowell, Obolensky) in first edition brings $100–$400.