James agee biography
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Bates College
James Agee (American, )
Author James Agee was one of the preeminent film critics of the twentieth century. After growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee, Agee attended Harvard University and then worked at Fortune and Time. He is noted for his ability to critique films and plays in layman’s terms rather than using convoluted terminology. Along with being a critic, he wrote several scripts and plays including The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter, as well as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Death in the Family.
He is photographed by his collaborator Walker Evans. They toured the South together for a project that became the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men () in which they showcased impoverished tenant farmers during the Great Depression. Here Agee looks road-weary, as this intense close up shows him squinting from the bright southern sun.
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The morning of Harvard&#;s commencement ceremony in , James Agee rushed over to Sanders Theatre with his convocation ode, which he had been elected to perform in front of his graduating class. He had composed the poem only the night before, finishing it shortly before he was to deliver it. In his rush to arrive on time, he forgot his mortarboard and hastily borrowed one from a female colleague; when he ascended the stage to present his ode, he found that he was wearing a conspicuously red Radcliffe tassel.
James Rufus Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler. His father was killed in a car accident when Agee was only six, and the tragedy left a lasting impression. His devout Christian mother found the strength to prevail through her faith in God, and, at the same time, she sent her children away to a Christian boarding school. There, Agee found refuge in the friendship of Father James Harold Flye, who replaced the absence of his father and t
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Let Us Now Praise James Agee
In , a generation before Kael gained fame for her New Yorker reviews, Agee (pronounced Ay-jee) signed on as a movie critic for both Time and the Nation, penning reviews often more memorable than the movies that inspired them. The Agee style—intensely literary and endlessly alert to the textual nuances of an emerging medium—was a striking departure from the prevailing movie coverage, which often seemed little more than a willing arm of the studio publicity mill. When Agee died in at the age of forty-five, fans of his film work immediately began clamoring for a book that would preserve his best reviews within covers, and Agee on Film appeared in The book’s publication affirmed the stature of bio criticism as its own art struktur, creating a standard that subsequent generations of reviewers have tried to match.
Decades after Agee’s passing, the idea of film reviewing as something intellectually valuable seems t