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| As part of Knoxville's
community-wide James Agee Celebration, the Special Collections Library
will be hosting an exhibit from April to August 2005 dealing with James
Agee's published and unpublished literary work. This display features
examples of Agee's early work (displayed in the section entitled "A
Man of Words"), manuscripts and publications dealing with Agee's
two most famous books, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and A Death
in the Family (contained in sections of the same name), and finally
items dealing with Agee's career in the American film industry (shown
in the "Agee on Film" section.) This display will be open during
the Library's normal working hours of 9.00am to 5.30pm, Monday through
Friday, and on Saturday, April 16, from 2.00pm to 6.00 pm. |
James Agee's writing career began
early. In his last year at Phillips-Exeter Academy in New Hampshire,
he served as editor of the Exeter Monthly and as president of
the literary society. The Hound & Horn: A Harvard Miscellany
(Spring 1929 edition) included Agee's poem "Anne Garner."
While at Harvard University, he was the editor-in-chief of The Harvard
Advocate. After graduation, he landed a job at Fortune magazine.
Agee's first collection of poetry, Permit Me Voyage,
was published by the Yale University Press in 1934. This collection
features sonnets and short lyrics, as well as longer works like "A
Chorale" and "Epithalamium." Permit Me Voyage
displays not only Agee's versatility as a poet, but also foreshadows
Agee's later career as novelist, critic and reviewer, and screenwriter.
Other work includes Agee's novella, The Morning Watch, published
by Houghton Mifflin in 1951. The next year, The Ford Foundation hired
Agee to write a script on the life of Abraham Lincoln for the television
show Omnibus. The Letters of James Agee to Father Flye,
first published in 1962, is an important posthumous work. The collection
offers insight into Agee as a man, not just a writer, and highlights
one of his most important friendships. |
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
began as an article about the living conditions of Southern sharecroppers
that James Agee and Walker Evans produced for Fortune magazine
in 1936. As part of their research, Agee and Evans spent four weeks
in the American South living among three tenant families. The result
was a non-traditional narrative that describes the sharecroppers' daily
existence.
The article expanded into a book length treatment, which was originally
intended to be the first of a trilogy called Three Tenant Families.
However, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, first published in 1941,
was the only installment. This work stands as a compassionate and moving
description of the squalid conditions of southern sharecroppers. Agee
found that contemporary society and the lackluster educational system
had trapped these families, but Agee saw beauty even in their humble
existence. In sections entitled "Money," "Shelter,"
"Clothing," "Education," and "Work," Agee
describes the families with an eye to the beauty and divinity of everyday
objects and situations.
After a few years, the book went out of print and remained unnoticed until the 1960s. Within a new
climate of social justice, the book received greater popularity and is now celebrated as an important
portrait of 1930s America.
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At the time of James Agee's unexpected
death in May 1955, his most famous work was left incomplete. A Death
in the Family was a lifelong project for Agee. Based on events in
Agee's own life, the story traces the effects of a father's death on
his family. Agee's friend David McDowell edited Agee's A Death in
the Family, which McDowell, Obolensky published as a novel in 1957.
In 1958, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
A Death in the Family was successfully adapted to the stage in
1960. Tad Mosel's All the Way Home ran for more than 300 performances
at the Belasco Theatre in 1960-1961. The play won the Pulitzer Prize
for Drama, the New York Critics Circle Award, and was nominated for
a Tony Award for Best Play during 1961. The film adaptation of All
the Way Home premiered in movie theatres in 1963. Two more versions
were produced for television, one in 1971 and another in 1981. Still
another aired in 2002. |
James Agee began writing book
reviews for Time in 1939. By 1941, he moved on to film reviews,
which he would continued to write up until 1948. From December 1942
to October 1948, he also wrote a signed column on film for The Nation.
After leaving Time and The Nation, Agee wrote movie scripts
based on two Stephen Crane stories, "The Bride Comes to Yellow
Sky" and "The Blue Hotel." The first appeared as part
of the 1952 film Face to Face. Agee actually appears on screen
as one of the characters in the segment, as well. Beginning in the late
1940s, Agee worked with Helen Levitt on several occasions, first on
the short documentary In the Streets and then on the longer film,
The Quiet One, directed by Sidney Meyers.
As his work in the film industry increased, Agee moved to California
in 1950. He and John Huston began working on an adaptation of C. S.
Forester's novel The African Queen. The film, starring Humphrey
Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, opened in Los Angeles on December 23,
1951 and nationwide on February 20, 1952. Agee completed a script for
an adaptation of David Grubb's The Night of the Hunter in 1954. It
premiered September 29, 1955 in New York - four and a half months after
Agee's death. |
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