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

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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: 14 | 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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A Death in the Family (Penguin Classics)

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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

Overhyped?
James Agee died in 1955, leaving A Death in the Family, barely finished, as his sole full-length novel. Agee was known for his poetry and non-fiction work, alongside movie reviews and screenplays. This was hailed as his masterpiece, and it obtained the Pulitzer Prize. But one wonders to what extent Agee's trajectory influenced the novel's reception.

A Death in the Family is one of these slow pieces where the action is in the impressions formed by the characters from a single event, in this case the death of a family member. Set in Knoxville, Tennessee, 1915, the novel does include a few moving scenes in between soft canvases of Southern life. But it is also filled with much dull and monotonous dialogue. It skids slowly in between high points. Indeed, the best chapters concern the children's reaction to their father's death, their incomplete understanding of what has happened, and their struggle with adult grief and embarrassment. But these chapters are a small part of the novel. The rest deals with the numerous and sometimes interchangeable members of the storyline's extensive family. The effect is uneven and, I found, not as stirring as the hype promises.

2010-07-24 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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An Affecting Self-Portrait
James Agee's mid-century classic, based on his own experiences, skips between straightforward narration of the events surrounding the death of a young father and husband, and the interior thought streams of the family. Also included are fragmentary flashback scenes found with the manuscript at the time of the author's death - but the editors, without guidance, and to avoid writing awkward transitional material, append these character studies and backstory elements to the end of Parts I and II. The result is a hybrid of Agee's words and of editorial structure - one that, despite the limitations of unlucky circumstances, retains its strength and poignancy.

For those who may wonder whether Agee's intentions were well served by his editors, a new edition has been published within the last few years edited by Michael A Lofaro that might answer that question - A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text. A selection of four chapters left out of the original edition - describing events that take place before the father's death - were previewed in Harper's Magazine in 2007, and though these sections are stylistically the same as the 1957 version, imagining these 'lost chapters' combined with the measured pacing of the traditional storyline does not strike me as a more complete rendering of Agee's purpose. To invert an old baseball saying, it would seem like subtraction by addition - tinkering with this powerful and effective work could very well magnify the present flaws that are concealed within the writing and ruin a delicate balance.

Agee's experience with losing his father at a young age was surely the drive behind this book, and no doubt much of what he writes is how he remembers it. But intentionally or no, the wealth of detail that he includes during his character's cultural response to their grief is noted with near anthropological care. And the characters are nearly primal in their emotions - unique to their time and place, they react in response to interior motivations rather than a melodramatic, homogeneous, learned set of emotions from popular media. It is an honest narrative.

Two issues only, though they run through the entire book. One is Agee's use of dialogue, which in its attempt to convey the rhythms of the area's speech includes too many instances of chatter that the reader could have easily inferred, and also some early use (though discontinued later) of 'eye dialect', or phonetic representation of a southern accent. The other problem, somewhat more serious, is Agee's attempt to present the children's viewpoints. By the time the novel concludes, there is an aggregate suspicion that Rufus and Caroline's thoughts are less like children's thoughts than a condescending adult's imagining of what a child's thoughts might be. Some readers may also question Agee's commentary regarding the efficacy of religious orders during personal tragedy. Undoubtedly this bitter view was based on experience, and in 1957, may also have been a rather dramatic attack on a powerful institution - today it seems loud and unsubtle.

Even with these flaws, (perhaps even because of them?), the book is strong and impressive in the examination of the thoughts of Jay Follett's family as they privately deal with the news of his death. Even more so, and worth the entire experience of the book is the introductory short, 'Knoxville: Summer of 1915', inserted by the editors as a prologue but originally published in 1938 - just excellent. For the remainder Agee sticks to the style pioneered by the modernist writers before him, most often reminding me of Dos Passos - but some of that is a product of the editors, and the structure they imposed on the manuscript. Still, the genuine effort at contemplative storytelling in 'A Death in the Family', as opposed to the jokey superficiality of more contemporary literature, feels like a restorative. An affecting, if tragic, self-portrait.

2010-06-29 (Earth) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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Sad, beautiful, artistic and real - this book tore at my heartstrings.
James Agee was born in Knoxville in 1909. At the age of 6 his father was killed in an automobile accident. The boy grew up to become a writer and then, in 1955, he died of a heart attack. He was working on "A Death in the Family" at the time and it was later pieced together, published in 1957 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958. I can well understand why. It is an amazing work that tore at my heartstrings and made it one of the saddest books I've ever read.

Art follows life. The book is set in 1915 and is the story of a family and the loss of a young husband in a car accident. Parts of the book are narrated through the voice of a young boy in a way that clear, nuanced and a slightly skewed portrait of how he views his world. There is also a poetic artistic tone through his eyes as well as throughout the whole work. As I read it I couldn't help but appreciate the unique way the author described his world.

In addition to the boy, we also meet the rest of the family - his mother, grandparents, aunt and uncle and younger sister. They become real and their feelings and reactions to the tragedy that befalls them is immediate and highly emotional. We go through all of this with them - the seed of disbelief, the agony of waiting to find out what happened and though it all there is a deep connection between the characters and the reader including flashbacks and conversations which help describe exactly who these people are. The father comes from mountain folk and his wife comes from the middle class. There is something rough and appealing about the father and I loved the way he was with his young son. The mother is religious and this gives her comfort but the Catholic priest she calls upon in her hour of need comes across in a negative way. All of the people seem absolutely real and the author gets into their hearts and souls. I especially loved his descriptions of the men - from the young boy whose confusion of the world around him is familiar and haunting to the companionship of the father and the honesty of his uncle.

The book brings the reader into the world of Knoxville in 1915. There are family relationships as well as some simple and evocative descriptions of the racism of the time. And though it all, I felt the loss of the husband, identified with the sorrow and consider this book a beautiful and artistic questioning of the meaning of life and death.

2010-04-07 (New York City) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Read it out loud: with voices
Agee is one of those writers who, for some reason, I always want to read aloud. It's a fairly difficult thing to do, because his pace and construction is so dependent on the sentiments underlying each sentence. And these, as is normal (I think) can vary from moment to moment, sentence to sentence. And these are so tightly wrought, I have no doubt that each word was carefully weighed. The power of voicing these sentiments, struggling with them, can be uncanny. Thankfully, you don't need a guide to understand his direction - this is language picked straight out of his life, and made sacred.

At first he seems to be playing games, faking you out with shifts in his foreshadowing. But despite awareness of the deployment of a strategy, I have never been able to sit down and read the whole thing straight through - my heart seems to stop, and I have to put it down. I get upset, viscerally. It tears me apart, up and down. A remarkable achievement- and if you have the time to look at an Agee biography, the vibrations only intensify.

2010-04-03 (Brooklyn, NY) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Tragic, charged with powerful emotions, steeped in Americana
'A Death in the Family' is, without doubt, one of the greatest American novels I have read. It was, at times, almost unbearable in its sadness. It re-connected me to feelings which are normally and, perhaps properly, stored away so securely that they rarely penetrate everyday consciousness. It is probably one-of-a-kind, and that is well, for I don't believe that it would be either necessary or healthy to undergo such a reading experience often.

I think to appreciate(notice I don't say "enjoy")this book, you have to be willing, temporarily, to suspend the normal defenses most of us employ, on a more or less permanent basis, against having to contemplate the reality and inevitability of death. Of course, this will then leave you vulnerable in a way which some might find so unpleasant that they should avoid the book altogether.

However, if you are willing to undertake this experience, knowing that it may dredge up strong and harrowing emotions, you may feel, as I do, that you have acquired something valuable in the process. I don't think the book, itself, so much has some special lesson to teach us, as that through relating to it's vivid and powerful evocation of a particular tragedy, it puts us in touch with our own personal experiences and feelings about death. When reflected on and assimilated, I think we may feel we have added to our store of self-knowledge and our perception of life in general.

Distilled as it was from the personal experience, as a small child, of the death of the author's father, we experience the added poignancy of viewing this death through the eyes of a vulnerable and innocent boy. How awesome, mysterious, and terrible this revelation of death was to one who had been unaware, and how remindful it is to those of us whose memories of this phase may have become blunted with time.

But the book is as much about life as it is about death. It is rich with the feelings and impressions of the people who must deal with the tragedy, feel the emotions, pay the proper respect, and somehow resume the course of life under altered circumstances, ever mindful of the void which can never be filled. From the minutiae connected with such an occurrence to the deeply profound suffering of the soul it causes, the novel immerses you in a drama which demands you experience it to the fullest.

Of course, not every death generates such reactions. I think it's fairly safe to say that Southern ties of kinship in Knoxville of 1915 were probably generally stronger than in our highly urbanized society of today, and the death of a young husband and father might have affected more people more strongly. However, this contrast only serves to suggest, in my opinion, that there were some very positive aspects to the customs of that bygone era.

There were negative aspects also to the strict and idealized model which people thought they had to live up to. There was prudishness and intolerance as well as intense love of family and strong ties to kin. There was conflict between stringent religious beliefs and more humanistic attitudes.

The intensity of grief encountered at such a young age as well as the very ambivalent and conflicting feelings of the adults in his family circle was no doubt the major formative influence of the author's life. Many years later he summoned up these experiences, and with remarkably beautiful prose, shaped them into a work of art.

2010-03-27 | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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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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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

In his own words
When I was in university in the 1960s for about year I carried this book around in my back pocket, being whimsically obnoxious to my friends by pulling it out and reading from it. For me these reviews are about the confusion about the place of this book in literature (a confusion which is correctly noted by these thoughtful reviewers) but I think they will make more sense if we quote Agee himself on his book:

"It is simply an effort to use words in such a way that they will tell as much as I want to and can make them tell of a thing which has happened and which, of course, you have no other way of knowing. It is in some degree worth your knowing what you can, not because you have any interest in me but simply as the small part it is of human experience in general. It is one way of telling the truth: the only way possible of telling the kind of truth I am here most interested to tell."

Like Finnegans Wake, this book is a never ending adventure in itself.

2010-08-12 (Fremont, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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additional information
Other reviewers have done a fine job describing this book. It is an often difficult (for several reasons) but I think important text that will be enjoyed by fans of history, sociology, literature, or art.

I wanted to suggest two sites that have additional information that readers may enjoy and find valuable:
The first is a 2005 article from Fortune (The Most Famous Story We Never Told) that follows up with Charles Burroughs (Burt Gudger)and Laura Minnie Lee Tengle (Flora Merry Lee Ricketts). It sheds some light on how the families perceived the assignment and book.
The second is the Library of Congress FSA-OWI collection ([...]) from which Evans's photographs are taken. Do a search on Hale County, AL and you'll find several dozen photos of the families including more candids and more smiles.

2010-07-15 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Knoxville is coming
Yes, their assignment was to document depression era sharecroppers, but that's not why you should read it. You should read it because James Agee, uniquely in my experience, gets drunk on American language the same way the Delphic sibyl got drunk on methane and babbled worship worthy Greek. I first fell in love with him through Barber's setting of Knoxville, Summer 1915, then I read his posthumous novel (which won him the Pulitzer) A Death in the Family. No other American writer writes like this. It is seductive, it is teasing, it s sometimes so convoluted and knotted it gives Henry James AND William Faulkner a run for their money. But in the end, the poetry blazes with a fierceness and an honest that makes me forget to breathe. Many reviewers refer to what they felt the book was trying to get them to do, as if it were, somehow, coercive. I just hear the great poet and the great poetry of Knoxville, Summer of 1915 coming, twenty years away, with such a deafening roar that I'm glad I'm alive, if only for the privilege of dying in the presence of such American greatness.

2010-05-24 | John-Michael Albert (Dover NH) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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

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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Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies (Modern Library the Movies)

Description

"In my opinion, [Agee's] column is the most remarkable regular event in American journalism today."--W. H. Auden

James Agee was passionately involved with the movies throughout his life. A master of both fiction and nonfiction, he wrote about film in clean, smart prose as the reviewer for Time magazine and as a columnist for The Nation. Agee was particularly perceptive about the work of his friend John Huston and recognized the artistic merit of certain B films such as The Curse of the Cat People and other movies produced by Val Lewton.

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Customer Reviews

The Master Writes His Love
James Agee was a great writer (his book about the Dust Bowl is a classic). He continued to be a brilliant writer in his film reviews and his scripts. Thank you, Modern Library, for returning these collections of writing to us. They are wonderful to read and they make you think!

2007-03-30 (Bronx, New York United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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He created serious film criticism
I still have my first edition copy of Agee on Film.

A production on the stage is seen once and then is gone forever. Curiously, despite the fact that a film can be viewed repeatedly, once upon a time revivals were rare, and most audiences saw a film once, talked about it, then forgot about it.

Even the film studios only half-heartedly treated their products as permanent, allowing many of them to deteriorate irretrievably and others nearly so (eventually giving rise to an entire industry devoted to film restoration).

Films were given a new life with the advent of television. Growing up on old movies on the tube in the 1950s, I found that repeated viewing of the same film could be a rich experience, and nothing enhanced this experience more than the appearance in the early 1960s of Agee on Film.

Agee took film seriously as a cultural experience, a molder of public opinion, a tool that might be useful or dangerous. Just how much he differs from mainstream reviewers who regarded the movies primarily as entertainment can be seen in the two different sets of reviews in this book.

His reviews in the liberal The Nation are extended analyses of the films and the sensibilities of the filmmakers, withering critiques of the limitations of the studio system, and manifestos on how good films could have been made better. Agee interpolates in his reviews his opinions about everything: The War (WWII, of course), politics, race, education, religion, psychology, philosophy ... the list goes on.

In contrast, his reviews for Time, constrained by that magazine's conservatism, are truncated and absent the depth and bite that distinguishes Agee from all other critics. His beautiful use of language keeps him afloat, but were it not for The Nation, I doubt Agee would have the reputation of Greatest Film Critic of All Time.

Agee on Film was originally in two volumes. The first was the current book. The second was a collection of Agee's own screenplays, including the classic The Night of the Hunter; Noa Noa, a fascinating teleplay about Gaugin (very different from Maughams' The Moon and Sixpence); and his magnificent adaptation of the The African Queen. Thus, he was able, unlike most critics, and with admirable results, to put his pen where his critique was.

James Agee almost single-handedly popularized the appreciation of film as an art form. The writing in this book is how he did it.

2005-08-21 (Brooklyn, NY) | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 5

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James Agee, an inspiring critic
Ever wonder what causes a movie reviewer to *become* a movie reviewer? When I was a ten-year-old kid just getting into classic movie comedies, I went to the library and checked out the book AGEE ON FILM solely because it had references to Charlie Chaplin and W.C. Fields. Thus was my introduction to high-quality film criticism.

James Agee made his reputation writing sterling movie reviews for Time and The Nation magazines in the 1940's. Among other glories, he wrote a much-heralded essay titled "Comedy's Greatest Era" that helped to bring silent-comedy icons (most notably Harry Langdon) out of mothballs and caused them to be re-viewed and discussed seriously among film historians. He later went on to work on the screenplays of a couple of gems titled The African Queen and Night of the Hunter.

Unfortunately, many people who regard the critics Pauline Kael and Stanley Kauffmann have either forgotten Agee's work entirely or have assigned his own work to mothballs. But among the faithful are film director Martin Scorsese, who serves as editor of the "Modern Library: The Movies" series of film books. The series has recently reissued the AGEE ON FILM book, and re-reading Agee's work (or reading it for the first time, if you're lucky enough) proves that film criticism can make for reading material as compelling as any fictional novel.

Agee passes the acid test for any film critic: Even if you don't agree with him, his writing is so lively that you can't help enjoying it. His work ranges from three separate columns (three weeks' worth, in print terms) to Chaplin's much-maligned (at the time) MONSIEUR VERDOUX, to the most concise, funniest review ever: Reviewing a musical potboiler titled YOU WERE MEANT FOR ME, Agee replied in four simple words, "That's what *you* think."

If you want to see what high-caliber movie criticism meant in the pre-Siskel & Ebert days, engross yourself in this sprawling book. It'll make you appreciate the decades before every newspaper, newsletter, and Internet site had its own minor-league deconstructionist of Hollywood blockbusters.

2001-06-17 | Cinemaven (Jacksonville Beach, FL USA) | Helpful Votes: 21 | Rating: 5

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Resurrected Film Study
James Agee was short for this world, having died in his mid 40s. In that span of time he wrote a famous book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and a couple of classic screenplays, AFRICAN QUEEN and NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. This collection of magazine film reviews and essays is in many ways the leftover part of his work, and yet it feels like enough to make a reputation on. His reviews span just one decade, the 1940s. Many of them tackle foreign films that may be unavailable for all I know.

Interesting to me is that he spends three weeks discussing Chaplin's MONSIEUR VERDOUX, which is a most unusual movie and mostly forgotten today. This might be because he saw it as his only chance to write a poignant piece on the greatest living film artist, or it may be because he identified with the plight of mankind theme that Chaplin was reaching for. You can pick another reason, yourself, but it was a bold decision, because most critics panned the film (according to him) and most readers probably couldn't even see the movie in their small towns. It was as if he knew he would be writing for posterity. Like all critics, he cultivated his darlings. He saw much in the work of John Huston and was very skillful in his sizing up of TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE. I was impressed that he predicted the all-time classic nature of the film, but also understood the studio system gimmicks that took away from the genius.

You don't have to be literary minded like W. H. Auden to enjoy this book. You'll like it, if you like movies.

2001-02-17 (Orlando, FL) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 4

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More than we ever deserved . . .
James Agee wrote film criticism in America at a time when the American film industry hardly deserved his attention. His celebrations of silent film comedy, of Preston Sturges, of John Huston [for whom he later wrote the script for The African Queen], and of the handful of worthy foreign films that he managed to see are what make this volume worth reading. Besides Agee's beautiful prose and above all his compassion. Interestingly, Agee was a fan of Frank Capra's comedies (It Happened One Night) and bemoaned the director's decent into serious social films (Mr Smith Goes To Washington, Meet John Doe). His negative review of It's a Wonderful Life, which has never been in print since it appeared in 1946, reveals the extent to which Agee was perhaps too far ahead of his time, and even of ours.

2000-05-12 | Helpful Votes: 16 | Rating: 5

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James Agee: Selected Poems (American Poets Project)

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• ISBN13: 9781598530322

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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