James Agee
James Agee | |
---|---|
Born | James Rufus Agee November 27, 1909 Knoxville, Tennessee, U.S. |
Died | May 16, 1955 New York City, U.S. | (aged 45)
Education | Harvard University (BA) |
Notable works | A Death in the Family, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men |
Spouse | Via Saunders
(m. 1933; div. 1938)Alma Mailman
(m. 1938; div. 1941)Mia Fritsch (m. 1946) |
Children | 4, including Joel |
James Rufus Agee (
Early life and education
Agee was born in
Agee's mother married St. Andrew's bursar Father Erskine Wright in 1924, and the two moved to Rockland, Maine.[5] Agee went to Knoxville High School for the 1924–25 school year, then traveled with Flye to Europe in the summer, when Agee was 16. 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
Career
After graduation, Agee was hired by
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. Fortune did not publish his article, but Agee turned the material into his 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.[6] 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 wrote, "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."[7] 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 to protect their identity.[8]
Agee left Fortune in 1937 while working on a book, then, in 1939, he took a book reviewing job at
In 1948, Agee quit his job to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for
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.[15] The commentary Agee wrote for the 1948 documentary The Quiet One was his first contribution to a film that was completed and released.[16]
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 that the published script was written by the film's director, Charles Laughton. Reports that Agee's screenplay for Hunter was not used have been proved false by the 2004 discovery of his first draft, which although 293 pages in length, contains many scenes included in the film that Laughton directed. Laughton seemed to have edited great parts of the script because it was too long.[17] While not yet published, the first draft has been read by scholars, most notably 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 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 sets this part of the record straight. [citation needed] Couchman, the author of a 2009 book about The Night of the Hunter, writes that Agee's screenplay would have been a film about six hours long, so Laughton had to cut and edit a considerable part of it.[18]
Personal life
Soon after graduation from Harvard University, 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 (1946–2016, known throughout life as Deedee) and Andrea, and a son, John.
Death
In 1951 in Santa Barbara, Agee, a hard drinker and chain-smoker, suffered a heart attack; on May 16, 1955, He was in New York City when he suffered a fatal heart attack in a taxi cab en route to a doctor's appointment.[19] He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, New York, property still held by Agee descendants.[20]
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, 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.[21]
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.[22]
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has grown to be considered Agee's masterpiece.[23] 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.[24]
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 four of 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.[25]
Bibliography
- 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
- 1948 The Tramp's New World, screenplay for Charlie Chaplin
- 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
- 1955 The Night of the Hunter, screenplay from Davis Grubb novel
- 1957 A Death in the Family (posthumous; stage adaptation: All the Way Home)
- 1958 Agee on Film
- 1960 Agee on Film II
- 1962 Letters of James Agee to Father Flye
- 1972 The Collected Short Prose of James Agee
- 2001 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (new edition)
- 2013 Cotton Tenants: Three Families, Melville House
Published as
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, Shorter Fiction (ISBN 978-1-931082-81-5. Stories include "Death in the Desert", "They That Sow in Sorrow Shall Reap" and "A Mother's Tale".
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Violette Editions, 2001, ISBN 978-1-900828-15-4.
- Film Writing and Selected Journalism: Uncollected Film Writing, 'The Night of the Hunter', Journalism and Book Reviews (Michael Sragow, ed.) (ISBN 978-1-931082-82-2.
- Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes, (Jonathan Lethem, preface) (ISBN 978-0-8232-2492-0.
References
- ^ "James Agee (1909–1955): Let us now praise famous writers". Chicago Tribune. February 27, 1977. Archived from the original on March 16, 2013. Retrieved December 4, 2010.
James Agee was born in Knoxville in 1909, to a father whose people were farmers (in Tennessee and Virginia) and a mother whose family members considered themselves "more cosmopolitan." Agee's father died young, in an accident frequently memorialized (most eloquently in the autobiographical novel A Death in the Family), but the conflict he helped engender would persist...
- ^ Journal of the Eighty-Fourth Annual Convention of the Church, Diocese of Tennessee, Nashville, Tenn., 1916
- ^ "Father James Harold Flye Papers - Vanderbilt University" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on May 2, 2016. Retrieved November 28, 2015.
- ^ Rev. James H. Flye, 100, is dead; Friend of James Agee, the writer, The New York Times, April 14, 1985. Retrieved November 27, 2015.
- ^ a b "Agee FIlms: Agee Chronology". Ageefilms.org. Archived from the original on October 27, 2018. Retrieved January 19, 2007.
- ISBN 978-0-306-80743-5.
- ^ Sullivan, John Jeremiah. "Southern Exposures". BookForum. Retrieved June 18, 2013.
- ^ Haughney, Christine (June 3, 2013). "A Paean to Forbearance (the Rough Draft)". New York Times. Retrieved June 18, 2013.
- ^
Chambers, Whittaker (1952). Witness. Random House. pp. 478, 493, 504, 615. ISBN 0-89526-571-0.
- ^ William Stott. Agee, James Rufus, American National Biography Online, February 2000. Retrieved November 27, 2015.
- ^ James Agee's reviews on the Nation's website. Retrieved November 27, 2015.
- ^ "Laurence Olivier Henry V". Murphsplace.com.
- ^ "The best film books, by 51 critics | Polls & surveys | Sight & Sound". British Film Institute. Retrieved July 25, 2019.
- ^ Helen Levitt, Who Froze New York Street Life on Film, Is Dead at 95, The New York Times, March 30, 2009. Retrieved November 27, 2015. — Walker Evans of New York's Photo League wrote, "Levitt's work was one of James Agee's great loves, and, in turn, Agee's own magnificent eye was part of her early training."
- ISBN 1-4039-6866-7
- ^ Wranovics (2005), p. 78
- ^ Malcolm, Derek (April 8, 1999). "Charles Laughton: Night of the Hunter". Theguardian.com.
- ^ Jeffrey Couchman: The Night of the Hunter: A Biography of a Film. Northwestern University Press, Evanston 2009, p. 87.
- ^ James Agee (1909–1955) Archived October 27, 2018, at the Wayback Machine Chronology of his Life and Work
- ^ Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More than 14000 Famous Persons, Scott Wilson
- ISBN 1-57233-594-7
- ^ Gritten, David (January 17, 2014). "Night of the Hunter: a masterpiece of American cinema". telegraph.co.uk.
- ISBN 9780313310171. Retrieved August 26, 2013.
- ^ Simon, David (April 16, 2011). "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans". davidsimon.com.
- ^ Matthew Everett, "R.B. Morris Revives His One-Act Play About James Agee," Knoxville Mercury, October 26, 2016.
Further reading
- Letters of James Agee to Father Flye, ISBN 0-87797-301-6
- James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, etc., The Library of America, 159, with notes by Michael Sragow, 2005.
- Alma Neuman, Always Straight Ahead: A Memoir, Louisiana State University Press, 176 pages, 1993. ISBN 0-8071-1792-7.
- Kenneth Seib, "James Agee: Promise and Fulfillment", in Critical Essays in Modern Literature, University of Pittsburgh Press, 175 pages, 1968.
- Geneviève Moreau, The Restless Journey of James Agee, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1977.
- Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, ed. Ian Aitken, London: Routledge, 2005
- Paul F. Brown, Rufus: James Agee in Tennessee, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 422 pages, 2018. ISBN 1621904245.
External links
- [1]Works by James Agee at Open Library
- [2]James Agee at the Internet Book List
- A chronology of James Agee's life & work Archived October 27, 2018, at the Wayback Machine, Agee Films
- James Agee Collection Archived February 10, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin
- Essay on Agee's Collected Work, The New Yorker
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men on Violette Editions Archived June 2, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
- Agee Films: Agee Archived August 21, 2019, at the Wayback Machine
- James Agee: A Bibliography, First Editions
- James Agee Film Project Photographs, 1879 - 1956
- [3]James Agee on the Muck Rack journalist listing site