James Agee

Forty years after its original publication, James Agee's last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man's death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed. On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to be a false alarm, but on his way back to his family, Jay has a car accident and is killed instantly. Dancing back and forth in time and braiding the viewpoints of Jay's wife, brother, and young son, Rufus, Agee creates an overwhelmingly powerful novel of innocence, tenderness, and loss that should be read aloud for the sheer music of its prose.

Contents: Survivors / Elsie Singmaster -- Lost Phoebe / Theodore Dreiser -- Golden honeymoon / Ring W. Lardner -- I'm a fool / Sherwood Anderson -- My old man / Ernest Hemingway -- Telephone call / Dorothy Parker -- Double birthday / Willa Cather -- Faithful wife / Morley Callaghan -- Little wife / William March -- Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald-- How beautiful with shoes / Wilbur Daniel Steele -- Resurrection of a life / William Saroyan -- Only the dead know Brooklyn / Thomas Wolfe -- Life in the day of a writer / Tess Slesinger -- Iron City / Lovell Thompson -- Christ in concrete / Pietro Di Donato -- Chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck -- Bright and morning star / Richard Wright -- Hand upon the waters / William Faulkner -- Net / Robert M. Coates -- Nothing ever breaks except the heart / Kay Boyle -- Search through the streets of the city / Irwin Shaw -- Who lived and died believing / Nancy Hale -- Peach stone / Paul Horgan -- Dawn of remembered spring / Jesse Stuart -- Catbird seat / James Thurber -- Of this time, of that place / Lionel Trilling -- Wind and the snow of winter / Walter Van Tilburg Clark -- Enormous radio / John Cheever -- Children are bored on Sunday / Jean Stafford -- NRACP / George P. Elliott -- In Greenwich there are many gravelled walks / Hortense Calisher -- Other foot / Ray Bradbury -- Three players of a summer game / Tennessee Williams -- Mother's tale / James Agee -- Magic barrel / Bernard Malamud -- Circle in the fire / Flannery O'Connor -- First flower / Augusta Wallace Lyons -- Contest for Aaron Gold / Philip Roth -- One ordinary day, with peanuts / Shirley Jackson -- To the wilderness I wander / Frank Butler -- Ledge / Lawrence Sargent Hall -- This morning, this evening, so soon / James Baldwin -- Tell me a riddle / Tillie Olsen -- Old army game / George Garrett -- Pigeon feathers / John Updike -- Sound of a drunken drummer / H.W. Blattner -- Keyhole eye / John Stewart Carter -- Long day's dying / William Eastlake -- Upon the sweeping flood / Joyce Carol Oates.

This collection, spanning over twenty-five years, includes the majority of Agee's significant ungathered and unpublished literary writing which promises to be of value for scholars who seek to understand the development of his career as a writer.

The Night of the Hunter -- incredibly, the only film the great actor Charles Laughton ever directed -- is truly a stand-alone masterwork. A horror movie with qualities of a Grimm fairy tale, it stars a sublimely sinister Robert Mitchum as a traveling preacher named Harry Powell (he of the tattooed knuckles), whose nefarious motives for marrying a fragile widow, played by Shelley Winters, are uncovered by her terrified young children. Graced by images of eerie beauty and a sneaky sense of humor, this ethereal, expressionistic American classic -- also featuring the contributions of actress Lillian Gish and writer James Agee -- is cinema's most eccentric rendering of the battle between good and evil. - Publisher.

The Morning Watch explores the thoughts and feelings of 12-year-old Richard, a student at an unnamed Episcopal boarding school (based on Agee's schooling at St. Andrew's-Sewanee School in Sewanee, Tennessee), over the course of a few hours in the early morning of Good Friday in 1923. Part I opens with Richard waking up to participate in the 4 AM shift of a nightlong prayer vigil in the school's chapel; Part II he goes to the chapel, prays, and decides to attend the 4:30 shift as well; Part III he leaves the chapel at 5 AM with two other boys, and they all run off to swim in the lake rather than go straight back to their dormitory, knowing they will be punished for this infraction. On their way to the lake, Richard discovers the intact shed skin of a locust, clinging to a tree; at the lake, the boys swim and then kill a snake; as they head back to school, Richard takes the locust shell with him.--Wickipedia

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book with text by American writer James Agee and photographs by American photographer Walker Evans, first published in 1941 in the United States. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men grew out of an assignment the two men accepted in 1936 to produce a Fortune magazine article on the conditions among sharecropper families in the American South during the "Dust Bowl". It was the time of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" programs designed to help the poorest segments of the society. Agee and Evans spent eight weeks that summer researching their assignment, mainly among three white sharecropping families mired in desperate poverty. They returned with Evans' portfolio of stark images—of families with gaunt faces, adults and children huddled in bare shacks before dusty yards in the Depression-era nowhere of the deep south—and Agee's detailed notes. As he remarks in the book's preface, the original assignment was to produce a "photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers". However, as the Literary Encyclopedia points out, "Agee ultimately conceived of the project as a work of several volumes to be entitled Three Tenant Families, though only the first volume, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was ever written". Agee considered that the larger work, though based in journalism, would be "an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity"

In addition to producing such distinguished literary works as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and A Death in the Family, James Agee spent almost two decades of his professional career in journalism, primarily as an anonymous staff writer for the Henry Luce magazines Fortune and Time. At Fortune, especially, Agee excelled in pointed, bemused reporting on American life that embraced a wide range of topics, from cockfighting to the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg to the ambitious programs of the Tennessee Valley Authority. What is arguably his most celebrated Fortune piece, The Great American Roadside, remains a remarkably prescient account of the ways in which the automobile was transforming America s economic landscape and cultural sensibility. This book, the second volume in The Works of James Agee series, recovers for modern readers the remarkable breadth and depth of Agee s reportage, beginning with his apprenticeship writings for student publications at Exeter and Harvard in the 1920s and 1930s and concluding with his last book review (of a Dylan Thomas screenplay), written in 1953 for the New York Times. Also included are two posthumously published pieces the Whitmanesque Brooklyn Is and a meditation on news photography and race relations, America! Look at Your Shame! as well as unpublished articles, book reviews, and rough drafts and notes that yield unique insight into theauthor s complex writing process. (Excluded from this volume but scheduled for a later one is Agee s much-heralded film criticism.) To say that Agee was ambivalent about journalism is an understatement: in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, he famously denounced it as a broad and successful form of lying. Yet, in his unsigned labors on behalf of the Luce empire and in various other assignments, Agee seized opportunities to hone his craft and exercise his acute powers of observation work that would serve him well as he undertook the kind of passionate and deeply personal writing that would secure his reputation. -- Amazon.com.

"Novelist, journalist, film critic, poet, and activist James Agee (1909-1955) produced an impressive array of literary works spanning three decades. His poems, novels, essays, works of criticism, and screenplays gave profound social insights into the Depression-ridden 1930s and war-torn 1940s, and scholars study and debate his work to this day. Agee, a Tennessee native, is arguably the most important literary figure from the state." "James Agee Rediscovered, edited by Michael A. Lofaro and Hugh Davis, gives a new and unique perspective on this prolific writer. With this book, the editors have put together an untarnished and unfettered collection of previously unpublished manuscripts of one of America's most intriguing authors. Featuring various drafts and fragments of Agee's manuscripts from University of Tennessee Special Collections, the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and the James Agee Trust, this book reveals the inner thoughts and creative sensibilities of an eclectic writer." "James Agee Rediscovered consists of journal entries, drafts of original material, and heretofore undiscovered literary works, as well as nineteen previously unpublished photos by Walker Evans."--Jacket.