Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, in Words and Photographs, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South

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• ISBN13: 9780618127498
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Description

In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when in 1941 LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN was first published to enormous critical acclaim. This unsparing record of place, of the people who shaped the land, and of the rhythm of their lives was called intensely moving and unrelentingly honest, and is "renowned for its fusion of social conscience and artistic radicality" (New York Times). Today it stands as a poetic tract of its time, recognized by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. With an elegant new design as well as a sixty-four-page photographic prologue of Evans's classic images, reproduced from archival negatives, this sixtieth anniversary edition reintroduces the legendary author and photographer to a new generation.

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Just what kind of book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? It contains many things: poems; confessional reveries; disquisitions on the proper way to listen to Beethoven; snippets of dialogue, both real and imagined; a lengthy response to a survey from the Partisan Review; exhaustive catalogs of furniture, clothing, objects, and smells. And then there are Walker Evans's famously stark portraits of depression-era sharecroppers--photographs that both stand apart from and reinforce James Agee's words.

Assigned to do a story for Fortune magazine about sharecroppers in the Deep South, Agee and Evans spent four weeks living with a poor white tenant family, winning the Burroughs's trust and immersing themselves in a sharecropper's daily existence. Given a first draft of the resulting article, the editors at Fortune quite understandably threw up their hands--as did several other editors who subsequently worked with a later book-length manuscript. The writing was contrary. It refused to accommodate itself to the reader, and at times it positively bristled with hostility. (What other book could take Marx as the epigraph and then announce: "These words are quoted here to mislead those who will be misled by them"?) Response to the book was puzzled or unfriendly, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sputtered out of print only a few short years after its publication. It took the 1960s, and a vogue for social justice, to bring Agee's masterwork the audience it deserved.

Yet the book is far more interesting--aesthetically and morally--than the sort of guilty-liberal tract for which it is often mistaken. On an existential level, Agee's text is a deeply felt examination of what it means to suffer, to struggle to live in spite of suffering. On a personal level, it is the painful, beautifully written portrait of one man's obsession. In its collaboration with Evans's photographs, the book is also a groundbreaking experiment in form. In the end, however, it is more than merely the sum of its parts. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, quite simply, a book unlike any other, simmering with anger and beauty and mystery. --Mary Park

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Customer Reviews

Let Me Now Praise
So many words written about this wonderful evocation of rural hardship, need I add more. A dab of Whitmanesque enthusiasm, a nother of Joycean stream of cosciousness(replete with a'Molly Bloom' sense of 'yea saying' in the final paragraph) There's a poignancy to the descriptive powers of the author that beckons the photos. It's as if the prints of the day's photography had arrived and Agee had paused over them before committing his pen to his diary. Regrettably, the photo section of my volume too easily broke from the spine of the book on opening it for the first time. However good these photos are, in a sense, they are made subsidiary to the marvels of the written word, demonstrating the power of an awesomely equipped author over the visual artist. He rambles, he meditates, he anguishes over his imposition as outsider author,and its this close to the bone marriage of inspection to introspection which will take hold of a suitably sympathetic reader until the book's final breath(check the ruminations on the patterns of a cross-cut saw on woodgrain on p 128. Admittedly there are ethical questions regarding this anthropological enterprise, but he chooses to absolve his anguish about them by raphsodising and elevating the stricken mood of the place and the people; canononizing them in ways the photos never reach for. This is accomplished by bringing an attentiveness to every scent and scratch in such tedious detail that no casual user or rural occupant would contemplate. Such slumming in the poverty zone would rankle political correctness these days, especially given the supple muscle of enriched vocabulary far beyond the comprehension and scope of his subjects. But, in literary terms, if p.c were to censor such a voice, all of us would be impoverished.

2009-10-27 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A timeless classic...
James Agee's painstaking and honest masterpiece is an exercise in empathy. It is a beautiful, tortured writing that speaks to both the deplorable conditions of the Depression-era souther sharecropper and the humanity of trying to present them in a favorable light.

Agee's writing style is at times erratic-- which helps to give the book its character. It is often self-doubting, as Agee calls himself a spy and frequently second guesses his role in accurately reporting the families' lives. Beautifully done and a groundbreaking classic in ethnographic fieldwork-- a must read!

2007-03-22 (Indiana) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 5

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If nothing else, certainly brilliant and thought-provoking
Let us Now Praise Famous Men, in all its poetry and prose, reminds me of an epic, like the Hindu Mahabharata or Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The lyrical narrative reveals just as much, if not more about Agee, than his subjects. His writing style excludes his subjects as readers.

His prose, which tends to be lofty and cerebral, is also beautiful and brilliant. But, I often wondered, who he was
writing for? The New Yorker audience? The distance in his observations often left me feeling cold. I imagine these hardworking sharecroppers exhibiting some joy, some evidence of warmth, of hope. But I had difficulty finding it in Agee's voice.

The length of Agee's sentences and paragraphs were long, each containing an entire scene, and I labored through them, hoping sleep would not steal me from a passage I might not finish. It was as though Agee too, was afraid sleep would come and steal him from his mission, and so kept hacking away at each sentence, adding commas and colons and semi-colons, lingering his thoughts across the page.

Whatever level of consciousness Agee existed, I could not hang with him for any more than a couple of sentences, as I would fall off the page and have to find my way back into the scene. Where was I? You get the picture...

Agee also uses parenthesis and colons, often not giving his parenthesis a mate: (This struck me as rather unusual and often, cold and detached--more like a voyeur. Did he fabricate his own method of communication using punctuation or was this being done elsewhere at the time? I felt left out of his thoughts when he did this, like when two people are communicating via sign language and you can't make out a word they're saying. Was he doing this in a way to urge us to "think," to stretch beyond the ordinary conventions and try something on that is foreign and unfamiliar, like his subjects and their hardship?

2006-09-15 | www.theyogaofwriting.com (Taos, NM) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 3

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Topic great, writers not so great.
The eloquence of composition surely necessitated infinite use of superlatives and verbs, resulting in a requisite painstaking remostrance to the reader, thus fettering the effusion and disembogulation of the document. In other words, wouldn't it have been better to just leave all of the fluff out of the book and just write as if the reader is someone other than the Queen of England? If you can weed through all of excessive use poems and verbs, it's a halfway decent book

2006-05-27 | southerner (Georgia) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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I thought I hated it at points, but I've never been able to get it out of my head.
This book is an amazing work of art. At times it's baffling, and at times almost impertinent--like when the author decides to describe every object in an entire home, and yet in all these things and in all the conflicting emotions it evokes, it creates a mood and a feeling and a setting that will seep into your skin and fog your brain for months.
The writing is beautiful, the story it tells--of poor, sharecropping, depression-era families--is heartbreaking, and the experience of reading about it all is like a baptism by fire. This book just might re-wire your brain.
I think this is a much better read than Agee's "A Death in the Family," and that one won the Pulitzer Prize. Read this, for sure.
I read it on a bus trip across Guatemala, and the way Agee's descriptions of the old southern poverty fit the poor little towns full of Guatemalan coffee pickers was uncanny.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and let us start with James Agee.

UPDATE: It's years later, and this book has never stopped haunting me. I think of it almost daily. If I were to review it today, I would definitely give it Five Stars.

2005-09-22 (Albuquerque, NM) | Helpful Votes: 19 | Rating: 4

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A Death in the Family (Penguin Classics)

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• ISBN13: 9780143105718
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Description

The classic American novel, re-published for the 100th anniversary of James Agee's birth

Published in 1957, two years after its author's death at the age of forty-five, A Death in the Family remains a near-perfect work of art, an autobiographical novel that contains one of the most evocative depictions of loss and grief ever written. As Jay Follet hurries back to his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, he is killed in a car accident-a tragedy that destroys not only a life, but also the domestic happiness and contentment of a young family. A novel of great courage, lyric force, and powerful emotion, A Death in the Family is a masterpiece of American literature.

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Customer Reviews

"...and fill you with wonder."
My older Avon edition, with the far more appropriate cover of the empty easy chair, had only one "blurb" on the back, from the now defunct "Saturday Review," which stopped publication in 1986. It said: "There's nothing quite like the excitement of coming upon a book and suddenly having it explode at you and fill you with wonder. Such a book is `A Death in the Family'." The quintessential blurb. I've remembered it for the 43 years since my first reading, and upon the second reading, find it equally appropriate and descriptive.

James Agee starts the book with an equally memorable sentence, as well as introductory passage: "We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child." From the title to the section, you know that the year is 1915, a date that can evoke nostalgia. The men, and yes it was mainly men, came home from work, ate dinner at 6:00 pm, and with no TV, at 6:30 would go outside to water the lawn, and the evenings were enjoyed on the front porch. Agee has a brilliantly precise depiction of the ritual of watering the lawn, from the noise in the hose, to the bell-shaped film of water that the spray can assume. I've rarely been able to use a hose since without recalling this descriptive passage.

The novel spans the two or three days which surround the death of Jay Follet in a car accident, and the subsequent impact his death had on his wife, their two small children, as well as the rest of the family. Yes, it was a simpler time, with cars in their infancy, and we learn that it was one cotter pin that fell out of the steering mechanism which resulted in the crash.

Much of the book is told from the point of view of the Follet's son, Rufus. Rarely does an adult writer have the ability to tell a story through the eyes of a child without mudding the waters with adult sensibilities and knowledge. In Agee's case though, I thought he hit ever note true. It certainly brought back a flood of memories from my own childhood, and how I had rarely thought about certain aspects since. The scene in which the older children make a performance out of making fun of 5-year old Rufus, who is only seeking their recognition and approval, is heart-breaking. Ah, the cruelty of children.

There were numerous other vignettes of equal intensity and insight, and these included a depiction of the alcoholism of Jay's younger brother Ralph; the conflicts in the marriage of Jay and Mary over alcohol and religion; a shopping trip with an aunt, with the importance of making your own style selections; the heartache of extreme age over 100; and a description of the night, from a child's bedroom. Agee's writing evokes deep emotion, again and again.

Many of us have, or may have to explain what death is to a young child. Forget all the "How to..." books on this one. Agee has written the sine qua non account. Agee also had a dim view of the "men of the cloth," and wrote a scathing portrait of the obtuse, pompous Father Jackson, who alienated both Rufus, and his sister Catherine, with numerous faux pas. Again, how much was projection of adult sentiments onto children? On the first reading, I obviously did not know, but on the second, something similar happened to my own children, when they were 6 and 7. They saw through the bad attitude of the "preacher man," and said they never wanted to go back; and they haven't. But it is Mary's brother, Andrew who delivers the most scathing critique, because Father Jackson would not perform all the rites since Jay had never been baptized: "Genuflecting, and ducking and bowing and scraping, and basting themselves with signs of the Cross, and all that disgusting hocus-pocus, and you come to one simple, single act of Christian charity and what happens? The rules of the Church forbid it. He is not a member of our little club. I tell you, Rufus, its enough to make a man puke up his soul."

42 years ago I recommended this book to a well-read friend and mentor from East Tennessee, and he came back with the verdict that this was just a "simple story, OK, but of not much significance." It has bothered me, in a low key way, lo' these many years. Was I originally right, or was his assessment correct? Surely I was right the first time... and the second reading has only confirmed, and even strengthened that assessment. I consider it one of the top 10 American novels ever written. A 6-star read.

2010-02-10 (Albuquerque, NM, USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A Death in the Family
This is the story of a father's untimely death and the family's reaction to it. At the beginning of this story you immediately know that this is a very close family. When the father is suddenly killed in an automobile accident we are taken on the journey the family must take as they realize the immediate and future changes to their family, their feelings and life. Agee did a great job of bringing the reader along. I felt the pain and grief due to the descriptive and emotional way this was written. He touched on other topics especially the church and the role it played in society during that time period. I found myself angry along with Mary's brother Andrew at the priest who refused to complete the service because her husband had not been baptized. This was definitely a good book.

2009-07-09 (Sarasota, Florida) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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purchase of A Death in the Family by James Agee
The book was as described by the seller.
We received it in a timely manner.

2009-05-29 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Beautiful classic
This book is a beautifully written novel about life and death in the early 20th century as seen through the eyes of a young boy. It is almost lyrical in the way it is written. The story revolves around a young family's father being killed instantly and unexpectantly. The character portrayals are so sharp that the reader feels he knows them intimately, and it is easy to relate them to our everyday acquaintances and relatives. This book is a must-read true classic.

2009-05-28 | er (NC USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Recommeded by a teacher
This book was recommended by a teacher at my daughter's school. It is also on a list of books on[...]. My daughter is required to read so many books during hte school year. This will be one of them.

2009-04-28 | Lady Purple (Atlanta, GA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, Shorter Fiction (Library of America)

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9781931082815
• Train: NEW
• Notes: Manufacturer New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Description

A passionate literary innovator, eloquent in language and uncompromising in his social observation and his pursuit of emotional truth, James Agee (1909- 1955) excelled as novelist, critic, journalist, and screenwriter. In his brief, often turbulent life, he left enduring evidence of his unwavering intensity, observant eye, and sometimes savage wit.

This volume collects his fiction along with his extraordinary experiment in what might be called prophetic journalism, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a collaboration with photographer Walker Evans that began as an assignment from Fortune magazine to report on the lives of Alabama sharecroppers, and that expanded into a vast and unique mix of reporting, poetic meditation, and anguished self-revelation that Agee described as "an effort in human actuality." A 64-page photo insert reproduces Evans's now iconic photographs from the expanded 1960 edition.

A Death in the Family, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that he worked on for over a decade and that was published posthumously in 1957, re-creates in stunningly evocative prose Agee's childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the upheaval his family experienced after his father's death in a car accident when Agee was six years old. A whole world, with its sensory vividness and social constraints, comes to life in this child's-eye view of a few catastrophic days. It is presented here for the first time in a text with corrections based on Agee's manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.

This volume also includes The Morning Watch (1951), an autobiographical novella that reflects Agee's deep involvement with religious questions, and three short stories including the remarkable allegory "A Mother's Tale."

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Customer Reviews

Walker Evans Iconic Photos Seem Missing
I may be [hope I am] mistaken here but as no mention is made of them it would seem that the scores of Evans photos which accounted for a good half of this America Classic's fame have been deleated, which would make this a ClassicComics trashing of the work.
What next? an edition of the Bible retaining all the "action" bits, omitting "all the dull stuff"

2009-02-26 | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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An American Classic
This recently reissued collecton of Agee's work includes the brilliant, touching photos of Walker Evans with James Agee, photos made during the Depression Era of the 'thirties. Agee's writings are true Americana, his prose flows and the reader is made a part of the families about which he writes. This compilation belongs in the library of anyone concerned with human feelings in times of hurtin', hunger, and need. If you lived through the time,as I did, you will know it again through Agee's superb reflections on it.

2006-03-27 (Ventura, CA United States) | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 5

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Rich Reading Experience
Lately, I find myself returning to literature written before I was born (1956). When I saw the review of LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN in THE NEW YORKER, I became instantly convinced that I should purchase it. I'd known Agee's work since I was 13, when I first read DEATH IN THE FAMILY. I belonged to the Scholastic Book Club and every month my mother gave me change out of her the bottom of her purse so I could buy the books I had faithfully marked on my order form. I was haunted by this book as a teen, and I remain haunted still. I will always believe that few American writers ever achieved anything comparable to the beginning of DEATH IN THE FAMILY, a short italicized introduction which begins: "We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child." Agee's sensory details throughout DEATH amaze. Another stunning passage reads: "Supper was at six and was over by half past. There was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish, like the lining of a shell;" I could go on, because every page of this book is a treasure. But I would like to turn my attention to LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, which I had never read until now.

I will preface my remarks by saying that I am a writer currently very interested in the distinction between fiction and non-fiction writing. Agee addresses this issue by saying: "In a novel, a house or person has his meaning, his existence, entirely through the writer. Here, a house or a person has only the most limited of his meaning through me: his true meaning is much huger." It's perhaps this interest of mine in the craft of writing itself that has made FAMOUS MEN so fascinating to me.

Another thing: In the beginning pages, Agee writes with absolute humility towards his own writing and his subject matter. This was stunning to me, because I've also read Agee's movie reviews, and in those writings Agee is witty, merciless, honest, and very confident in his own opinion. In short, they are some of the best movie reviews I have ever read. However, FAMOUS MEN is another kind of writing altogether. As Agee admits, his efforts to capture his subject matter through words were a failure. Words are inefficient, inadequate in matters so huge. He wrote: "If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement."

That FAMOUS MEN is not more popular does not surprise me, nor was Agee surprised, I think, when the book got bad reviews and suffered poor sales. FAMOUS MEN, I think, is not the sort of book that would ever gain wide acceptance. It is a flawed masterpiece that takes a lot of work to absorb, but well worth the effort.

I don't know the extent to which Agee may have been devastated, nonetheless, at the way America turned its back on his masterpiece. I do know that Agee seemed to suggest in the early pages of FAMOUS MEN that the worst thing that can happen to any artist is mass acceptance. Perhaps mass acceptance is something the writer both wants and fears; I don't know. But Agee does say in FAMOUS MEN that he felt that as soon as, say, Beethoven's music is used as a form of relaxation or as a background to the mundane activities human beings inevitably become so wrapped up in, then the music has lost its vitality. That is why Agee suggests:

"Get a radio or a phonograph capable of the most extreme loudness possible, and sit down to listen to a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or of Schubert's C-Major Symphony. But I don't mean just sit down and listen. I mean this: Turn it on as loud as you can get it. Then get down onto floor and jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly as possible, and not moving, and neither eating nor smoking nor drinking. Concentrate everything you can into your hearing and into your body. You won't hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it."

The same might be said for FAMOUS MEN. You can't read it as you would some other books, even DEATH IN THE FAMILY, which has a nice and clean chronological structure. You have to really pay attention when you read FAMOUS MEN. If you concentrate, you will hear FAMOUS MEN in your whole body. And if it hurts you, you will be glad.

2006-02-03 | Zen (USA) | Helpful Votes: 12 | Rating: 5

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An Overlooked-Writer
Let me be clear... I've not read the present volume though I've read the individual books collected in it years ago. "A Death in the Family" remains vivid in my memory, depite almost 30 years since I last read it, and "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" is an absolute classic.

Though I have not yet received the LOA edition, I was compelled to add a review if only to counter the first reviewer here who is intent on seeing only ideology rather than the writing. If the work is looked at without the rose-colored glasses of (conservative) political correctness, you'll find there is an amazing writer and thinker behind the words.

Just read the works for yourself, not through an ideological smokescreen.

2005-09-26 (Arlington, VA United States) | Helpful Votes: 28 | Rating: 5

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Let Us Now Reexamine Famous Men
Agee was a bleeding-heart to end all bleeding-hearts, and would that he had! Like most members of the genus, his life and work were compromised by posturing, mawkishness and complacency in anguish. The gush of his prose--the hemorrhaging of that bleeding heart--is deeply and cloyingly purple. His endless rhapsodies betray a stubborn adolescence that will delight those who see an artist as a perpetual kid and repel those who don't.

Immense suffusions of tenderness are not the most helpful or respectful response to fellow human beings, and they signal an obsession with one's own feelings instead of their ostensible object. In this regard, one notes that Agee's tenderness did not prevent him from engaging in serial adulteries and enforced threesomes, devoting his life to personal fulfillment rather than self-denying altruism, and indulging himself to death by the age of 45. Of course Agee felt guilty about all this (his writing fairly reeks of a rotting conscience), but he saw his guilt as a reassuring index of purity, like the parishioner who sees confession and absolution as a license to go on sinning.

In any case, Agee's tenderness was reserved for the disadvantaged. The obverse of this solicitude was an affected brutality of reference to just about everyone else. This tough-talking pose, which has not worn well, assumed a moral superiority that the record does not bear out.

Art and morality are not the same thing, but Agee thought they were, and this confusion permeates his work. Again and again he makes moral claims upon us which he thinks that his aesthetic project will validate. It does nothing of the kind: it merely aestheticizes.

What did Agee actually do for the Gudgers, Woods and Ricketts other than make the hearts of his readers bleed for them in as transient a fashion as his own? In one respect, at least, he did more harm than good. He over-idealized "Louise Gudger" to such a degree that he left her with a permanent sense of failure. Unable to reconcile Agee's fantasy portrait with the reality of her ordinary self, she finally committed suicide--further proof that sentimentality can be pernicious as well as meretricious.

Agee did possess extraordinary powers of lyric observation, and a sharp mind when he wanted to use it; but aching sensitivity, metastasizing into ecstatic intoxication, tended to distort his vision, soften his rigor and infantilize his voice. He has his devoted followers, or rather his cultists, but one doubts that his place in the canon is as secure or exalted as they might wish, or as this Library of America volume would suggest.

2005-09-22 (Boston, MA United States) | Helpful Votes: 24 | Rating: 2

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James Agee: Selected Poems (American Poets Project)

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• ISBN13: 9781598530322
• Notes: Trade-mark New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Outfit: NEW

Description

Better known for writing in a variety of other genres, James Agee always thought of himself as essentially a poet. Winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition in 1934 for Permit Me Voyage, Agee was, in the words of editor Andrew Hudgins, “as restless in his poetry as he was later in his prose, exhibiting a variety . . . that we expect from the protean mind that excelled in so many different kinds of writing.” Ranging from intense religious sonnets to lyrics for musical comedy, Agee’s verse takes us into the heart of his unique genius, what Robert Fitzgerald called his “sense of being . . . a raging awareness of the sensory field in depth and in detail.”

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James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism (Library of America)

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• ISBN13: 9781931082822
• Notes: Maker New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Adapt: NEW

Description

James Agee brought to bear all his moral energy, slashing wit, and boundless curiosity in the criticism and journalism that established him as one of the commanding literary voices of America at mid-century. In 1944 W. H. Auden called Agee's film reviews for The Nation "the most remarkable regular event in American journalism today." Those columns, along with much of the movie criticism that Agee wrote for Time through most of the 1940s, were collected posthumously in Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments, undoubtedly the most influential writings on film by an American.

Whether reviewing a Judy Garland musical or a wartime documentary, assessing the impact of Italian neorealism or railing against the compromises in a Hollywood adaptation of Hemingway, Agee always wrote of movies as a pervasive, profoundly significant part of modern life, a new art whose classics (Chaplin, Dovzhenko, Vigo) he revered and whose betrayal in the interests of commerce or propaganda he often deplored. If his frequent disappointments could be registered in acid tones, his enthusiasms were expressed with passionate eloquence. This Library of America volume supplements the classic pieces from Agee on Film with previously uncollected writings on Ingrid Bergman, the Marx Brothers, Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat, Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine, and a wealth of other cinematic subjects.

Agee's own work as a screenwriter is represented by his script for Charles Laughton's unique and haunting masterpiece of Southern gothic, The Night of the Hunter, adapted from the novel by Davis Grubb. This collection also includes examples of Agee's masterfully probing reporting for Fortune-on subjects as diverse as the Tennessee Valley Authority, commercial orchids, and cockfighting-and a sampling of his literary reviews, among them appreciations of William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, S. J. Perelman, and William Carlos Williams.

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Customer Reviews

Insightful, Inspired, Kind
James Agee was the first film critic, that I know of, who percieved and prophesied the poetic power of images on film. After reading his addictive reviews and enjoying his rich and witty prose the reader will know a lot about Agee the man, his sensitivities, his ideals and his prejudices. Anyone interested in film from the 1940's or film criticism in general should really own this book.

An excerpt:
"During the long climax these clashings blend in such a way that the picture, faults and all, soars along one of the rarest heights possible to art-the height from which it is seen that the whole race, including the observer, is to be pitied, laughed at, and revered for its delusions of personal competence for good, evil, or mere survival, as it sleepwalks along ground which continuously opens bottomless chasms beneath the edges of its feet."

Obviously these are not simply movie reviews, they are personal essays on the topic of film revealing a sensitive humanist and visionary of the latent power of images.

2008-06-17 (austin tx) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Film Writing and Selected Journalism
Includes the classic Agee on Film as well as the screenplay for the classic, chilling Night of the Hunter, this is a must read for film fans of the WWII era. Never shy to express an opinion, Agee wrote with great passion and intellegence about the films of the period. I was esp. impressed with the features he wrote for the fledgling perodical - The Nation. When he discovered a film he liked, he would delve into great detail on what interested him in the work (sometimes pieces would continue from one issue into the next). I also appreciated his willingness to say that a film touched a particular interest in him and might not be to the taste of all readers (can you imagine a critic doing that today - actually putting him or herself out there as just another spectator as opposed to a critical god....) As with the theatrical writings of Ken Tynan - a treasure.

2005-12-14 (Washington, D.C.) | Helpful Votes: 13 | Rating: 4

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James Agee: A Life

Description

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Customer Reviews

The Goods and the Bads
Description:
A biography of the American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter James Agee.

The Good:
This book is a solidly written account of James Agee's life from his youngest days to his infamously early death of a heart attack in the 1950s. I've been fanatical about Agee since I read _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_, and this book is a great read for anyone who's interested in his works but unfamiliar with the life of the man himself. I devoured this biography.

The Bad:
Two things come to mind. The first and most relevant is that Bergreen draws on Agee's own writing (in _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_, _A Death in the Family_, and other books) to flesh out his depiction of Agee's life. It's a bit disconcerting to find quotes that supposedly describe Agee's fictional characters applied to the author's life as if taken directly from a non-fiction source. Granted, Agee's novels were little more than dressed-up autobiographies, but it's hard to shake the feeling that Bergreen shouldn't be quoting them directly as if they were unequivocal truth.
Secondly, for someone who's come to admire Agee for his extraordinary prose, it can be a bit of a shock to discover that he was just a mere mortal, and a pretty flawed one at that. To focus only on the negatives in the book would give us a portrait of Agee as a self-obsessed alcoholic incapable of restraining his puerile sexual urges, causing untold damages to his relationships with his friends and family. Of course Bergreen is a very fair biographer and we don't only get this impression, but it's still somewhat difficult to imagine the man described acted as the vessel for the literary legacy that outlived him.

The Verdict:
Agee: A Life is a wonderfully written biography of the flawed genius who was James Agee. The photographs are a great addition, as they allow the reader to look over the friends and the various women who passed through his life. Highly recommended for those who are interested in the inspirations for his work and the conditions under which Agee wrote his articles, novels and scripts.

2004-08-30 (Baltimore, MD) | Helpful Votes: 10 | Rating: 4

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A very sad story
James Agee was a tremendously talented writer. And apparently a real drunk. This is a very sad and familiar story. Bergreen tells the story well, one of those tales that makes us wonder what in the world is going on inside our heads. On the other hand, one might say Agee simply had a rather commn disease (alcoholism) at a time when effective help was still hard to get. (He was 45 years old when he died of a heart attack in 1955.)
I read "Let us Now Praise Famous Men" when I was sixteen years old and it had a tremendous impact on me. It's a book to keep coming back to. Agee seemed so interested in the plight of others. It's a shame he didn't get the help that may have benefitted him. I look forward to reading Erik Wensberg's biography.

2004-01-07 (Carlisle, PA United States) | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 4

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