James Agee (November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was a United States novelist, screenwriter, journalist, poet, and film critic. In the 1930s and 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 Pulitzer Prize.

Agee was born at 15th and Highland Streets in Knoxville, Tennessee. He lost his father at the age of six in an automobile accident. Much of his early education was at a boarding school for boys. He attended Saint Andrew's School for Mountain Boys, now Saint Andrews-Sewanee School, Phillips Exeter Academy, where he edited the Monthly and Harvard University, where he was president of the Harvard Advocate.

After graduation, he wrote for Fortune and Time magazines. In 1934, he published his first volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage, with a foreword by Archibald MacLeish. In the summer of 1936, he spent eight weeks with the photographer Walker Evans living among sharecroppers in Alabama. Although Fortune never published his article, the material became a book in 1941, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

In 1951, Agee suffered the first in a series of heart attacks, which ultimately claimed his life four years later, at the age of 45, while riding in a taxicab in New York City. His considerable if erratic career as a movie script writer was by then curtailed by alcoholism, and his contribution to The Night of the Hunter (1955) remains unclear. During the 1950s he worked on movies with photographer Helen Levitt.

During his life he had modest recognition by the public but since his death in 1955 his literary reputation has grown enormously.

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (1941) has been placed among the top works of literature in the 20th Century by both the New York Public Library and the NYU School of Journalism selection committees.

List of works

• Permit Me Voyage
• Three Tenant Families
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
• The African Queen
• The Morning Watch
• The Night of the Hunter
• A Death in the Family (stage adaptation: All the Way Home)
• Agee on Film
• Agee on Film II
• Letters of James Agee to Father Flye
• The Collected Short Prose of James Agee

External links

• A Mother's Tale, full text