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49-524: James Rufus Agee ( / ˈ eɪ dʒ iː / AY -jee ; November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, writing for Time , he was one of the most influential film critics in the United States. His autobiographical novel , A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize . Agee is also known as

98-508: A "vernacular" style, a common aesthetic made popular by Geoffrey Batchen in his seminal article "Vernacular Photographies." Evans died at his apartment in New Haven, Connecticut in 1975. The last person Evans talked to was Hank O'Neal . In reference to the newly created A Vision Shared project, O'Neal recounts, "The picture on the back of the book , of him taking a picture – he actually called me up and told me he had found it”. “And then

147-606: A co-writer of the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and as the screenwriter of the film classics The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter . Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee , to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler, at Highland Avenue and 15th Street, which was renamed James Agee Street, in what is now the Fort Sanders neighborhood . When Agee was six, his father was killed in an automobile accident. From

196-586: A considerable part of it. Soon after graduation from Harvard University , he married Olivia Saunders (aka "Via") on January 28, 1933; they divorced in 1938. Later that same year, he married Alma Mailman. They divorced in 1941, and Alma moved to Mexico with their year-old son Joel to live with Communist politician and writer Bodo Uhse . Agee began living in Greenwich Village with Mia Fritsch, whom he married in 1946. They had two daughters, Julia (1946–2016, known throughout life as Deedee) and Andrea, and

245-583: A correspondence with Dwight Macdonald . At Phillips Exeter, Agee was president of The Lantern Club and editor of the Monthly , where his first short stories, plays, poetry and articles were published. Despite barely passing many of his high school courses, Agee was admitted to Harvard College 's class of 1932, where he lived in Thayer Hall and Eliot House . At Harvard, Agee took classes taught by Robert Hillyer and I. A. Richards ; his classmate in those

294-659: A deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. Critic Janet Malcolm notes that a contradiction existed between a kind of anguished dissonance in Agee's prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans' photographs of sharecroppers . In 1936, Walker Evans, employed by the National Recovery Administration photographed three impoverished sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama . The photographs became iconic and were praised for effectively capturing

343-462: A film critic for The Nation . Agee was an ardent champion of Charlie Chaplin 's then unpopular film Monsieur Verdoux (1947), since recognized as a classic. He was a great admirer of Laurence Olivier 's Henry V and Hamlet , especially Henry V . He also was an ardent champion of D. W. Griffith 's The Birth of a Nation , which he lavishly praised for its stylistic innovations and virtuosity without critically commenting on its celebration of

392-503: A foreword by Archibald MacLeish . In the summer of 1936, Agee spent eight weeks on assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans , living among sharecroppers in Alabama . Fortune did not publish his article, but Agee turned the material into his 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men . It sold only 600 copies before being remaindered . Another manuscript from the same assignment discovered in 2003, titled Cotton Tenants,

441-482: A freelancer in the 1950s, Agee continued to write magazine articles while working on movie scripts; he developed a friendship with photographer Helen Levitt . In 1947 and 1948, Agee wrote an untitled screenplay for Charlie Chaplin, in which the Tramp survives a nuclear holocaust ; posthumously titled The Tramp's New World , the text was published in 2005. The commentary Agee wrote for the 1948 documentary The Quiet One

490-476: A history teacher at St. Andrew's, and his wife, Grace Eleanor Houghton, began in 1919. As Agee's close friend and mentor, Flye corresponded with him on literary and other topics through life and became a confidant of Agee's soul-wrestling. He published the letters after Agee's death. The New York Times Book Review called The Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (1962) "comparable in importance to F. Scott Fitzgerald' s ' The Crackup ' and Thomas Wolfe's letters as

539-793: A job from the U.S. Department of the Interior to photograph a government-built resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. He quickly parlayed this temporary employment into a full-time position as an "information specialist" in the Resettlement Administration (later called the Farm Security Administration ), a New Deal agency in the Department of Agriculture. From October 1935 on, he continued to do photographic work for

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588-496: A one-act play by Knoxville-based songwriter and playwright RB Morris, takes place in a New York apartment during one night in Agee's life. The play has been performed at venues around Knoxville, and at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village . Autobiographical novel An autobiographical novel , also known as a autobiographical fiction , fictional autobiography , or autobiographical fiction novel ,

637-523: A self-portrait of the artist in the modern American scene." Agee's mother married St. Andrew's bursar Father Erskine Wright in 1924, and the two moved to Rockland, Maine . Agee went to Knoxville High School for the 1924–25 school year, then traveled with Flye to Europe in the summer, when Agee was 16. On their return, Agee transferred to a boarding school in New Hampshire , entering the class of 1928 at Phillips Exeter Academy . Soon after, he began

686-540: A sense of America", according to a press release, was on view at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in early 1971. Selected by John Szarkowski , the exhibit was titled simply Walker Evans . Evans's style has been hard to describe. John Szarkowski regarded his work as different, and MOMA considers him "one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century." In a 1964 lecture at Yale University, Evans described his own style as "Lyric Documentary." Others, such as Jane Tormey, have described his later work as having

735-601: A son, John. In 1951 in Santa Barbara , Agee, a hard drinker and chain-smoker, suffered a heart attack; on May 16, 1955, he was in Manhattan when he suffered a fatal heart attack in a taxi cab en route to a doctor's appointment. He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, New York , property still held by Agee descendants. During his lifetime, Agee enjoyed only modest public recognition. Since his death, his literary reputation has grown. In 1957, his novel A Death in

784-565: A staff writer at Time . Shortly afterward, he became an editor at Fortune through 1965. That year, he became a professor of photography on the faculty for graphic design at the Yale University School of Art. In one of his last photographic projects, Evans completed a black-and-white portfolio of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. 's offices and partners for publication in "Partners in Banking", published in 1968 to celebrate

833-414: Is a type of novel which uses autofiction techniques, or the merging of autobiographical and fictive elements. The literary technique is distinguished from a typical autobiography or memoir by being a work of fiction presented in the same fashion as a typical non-fiction autobiography by "imitating the conventions of an autobiography." Because an autobiographical novel is partially fiction,

882-466: Is believed to be the essay submitted to Fortune editors. The 30,000-word text, accompanied by photographs by Walker Evans, was published as a book in June 2013. John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote, "This is not merely an early, partial draft of Famous Men, in other words, not just a different book; it's a different Agee, an unknown Agee. Its excellence should enhance his reputation." A significant difference between

931-544: Is some dispute over the extent of his participation in the writing of The Night of the Hunter . Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has grown to be considered Agee's masterpiece. Ignored on its original publication in 1941, the book has been placed among the greatest literary works of the 20th century by the New York School of Journalism and the New York Public Library . It was the inspiration for

980-486: The Aaron Copland opera The Tender Land . David Simon , journalist and creator of acclaimed television series The Wire , credited the book with impacting him early in his career and influencing his practice of journalism. The composer Samuel Barber set sections of "Descriptions of Elysium" from Permit Me Voyage to music, composing a song based on "Sure On This Shining Night". In addition, he set prose from

1029-639: The Ku Klux Klan . Agee on Film (1958) collected his writings of this period. Three writers listed it as one of the best film-related books ever written in a 2010 poll by the British Film Institute . In 1948, Agee quit his job to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for Life Magazine about the silent movie comedians Charles Chaplin , Buster Keaton , Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon . The article has been credited for reviving Keaton's career. As

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1078-652: The Loomis Institute and Mercersburg Academy , then graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts in 1922. He studied French literature for a year at Williams College , spending much of his time in the school's library before dropping out. He returned to New York City and worked as a night attendant in the map room of the Public Library. After spending a year in Paris in 1926, he returned to

1127-506: The New York City Subway with a camera hidden in his coat. These were collected in book form in 1966 under the title Many Are Called . These photos figure in the novel "Rules of Civility" by Amor Towles. In 1938 and 1939, Evans worked with and mentored Helen Levitt . Like such other photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson , Evans rarely spent time in the darkroom making prints from his own negatives . He loosely supervised

1176-521: The "Knoxville" section of A Death in the Family in his work for soprano and orchestra titled Knoxville: Summer of 1915 . "Sure On This Shining Night" has also been set to music by composers René Clausen , Z. Randall Stroope , and Morten Lauridsen . In late 1979, the filmmaker Ross Spears premiered his film AGEE: A Sovereign Prince of the English Language , which was later nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and

1225-494: The Family (based on the events surrounding his father's death) was published posthumously and in 1958 won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 2007, Michael Lofaro published a restored edition of the novel using Agee's original manuscripts. Agee's work had been heavily edited before its original publication by publisher David McDowell. Agee's reviews and screenplays have been collected in two volumes of Agee on Film . There

1274-713: The RA and later the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the Southern United States . In November 1935, he visited the industrial hub of the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania , capturing photos of Bethlehem Steel . His photograph, Bethlehem Graveyard and Steel Mill , which captured Bethlehem 's St. Michael's Cemetery in the foreground and Bethlehem Steel's smokestacks in the background ranks among his best known. In

1323-553: The United States to join a literary and art crowd in New York City. John Cheever , Hart Crane , and Lincoln Kirstein were among his friends. He was a clerk for a stockbroker firm on Wall Street from 1927 to 1929. Evans took up photography in 1928 around the time he was living in Ossining, New York . His influences included Eugène Atget and August Sander . In 1930, he published three photographs ( Brooklyn Bridge ) in

1372-656: The United States, and 31 of his photos appeared in Beals' book. The cache of prints left with Hemingway was discovered in Havana in 2002 and exhibited at an exhibition in Key West . The Great Depression years of 1935–36 were a period of remarkable productivity and accomplishment for Evans. In 1935, Evans spent two months on a fixed-term photographic campaign in West Virginia and Pennsylvania . In June 1935, he accepted

1421-599: The age of seven, Agee and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in several boarding schools . The most prominent of these was near his mother's summer cottage two miles from Sewanee, Tennessee . Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys was run by the monastic Order of the Holy Cross affiliated with the Episcopal Church . It was there that Agee's lifelong friendship with Episcopal priest Father James Harold Flye,

1470-484: The author does not ask the reader to expect the text to fulfill the "autobiographical pact". Names and locations are often changed and events are recreated to make them more dramatic but the story still bears a close resemblance to that of the author's life. While the events of the author's life are recounted, there is no pretense of exact truth. Events may be exaggerated or altered for artistic or thematic purposes. Novels that portray settings and/or situations with which

1519-731: The author is familiar are not necessarily autobiographical. Neither are novels that include aspects drawn from the author's life as minor plot details. To be considered an autobiographical novel by most standards, there must be a protagonist modeled after the author and a central plotline that mirrors events in their life. Novels that do not fully meet these requirements or are further distanced from true events are sometimes called semi-autobiographical novels . Many novels about intense, private experiences such as war , family conflict or sex , are written as autobiographical novels. Some works openly refer to themselves as " non-fiction novels ". The definition of such works remains vague. The term

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1568-413: The families made them icons of Depression-era misery and poverty. In September 2005, Fortune revisited Hale County and the descendants of the three families for its 75th-anniversary issue. Charles Burroughs, who was four years old when Evans and Agee visited the family, was "still angry" at them for not even sending the family a copy of the book; the son of Floyd Burroughs was also reportedly angry because

1617-682: The family was "cast in a light that they couldn't do any better, that they were doomed, ignorant". Evans continued to work for the FSA until 1938. That year, an exhibition, Walker Evans: American Photographs, was held at the Museum of Modern Art , New York. This was the first exhibition in the museum devoted to the work of a single photographer. The catalogue included an accompanying essay by Lincoln Kirstein, who Evans befriended in his early days in New York. In 1938, Evans also took his first photographs in

1666-409: The first draft has been read by scholars, most notably Jeffrey Couchman of Columbia University . He credited Agee in the essay, "Credit Where Credit Is Due". Also false were reports that Agee was fired from the film. Laughton renewed Agee's contract and directed him to cut the script in half, which Agee did. Later, apparently at Robert Mitchum 's request, Agee visited the set to settle a dispute between

1715-470: The making of prints of most of his photographs, sometimes only attaching handwritten notes to negatives with instructions on some aspect of the printing procedure. Between 1940 and 1959, Walker Evans was awarded three Guggenheim Fellowships in Photography to continue his work of making record photographs of contemporary American subjects. Evans was a passionate reader and writer, and in 1945 became

1764-984: The negative effects of the Great Depression in the American South . The photographs are displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art , the Whitney Museum and the National Galleries of Scotland among other places. The three families headed by Bud Fields, Floyd Burroughs, and Frank Tingle, lived in the Hale County town of Akron, Alabama , and the owners of the land on which the families worked told them that Evans and Agee were "Soviet agents", although Allie Mae Burroughs, Floyd's wife, recalled during later interviews her discounting that information. Evans' photographs of

1813-577: The next morning I got up and I had a phone call from Leslie Katz , who ran the Eakins Press . And Leslie said: ‘Isn’t it terrible about Walker Evans?’ And I said: ‘What are you talking about?’ He said: ‘He died last night.’ I said: ‘Cut it out. I talked to him last night twice’ ... So an hour and a half after we had our conversation, he died. He had a stroke and died." In 1994, the estate of Walker Evans handed over its holdings to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

1862-601: The permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the George Eastman Museum . Walker Evans was born in St. Louis , Missouri to Jessie (née Crane) and Walker Evans. His father was an advertising director. Walker was raised in an affluent environment; he spent his youth in Toledo, Ohio , Chicago , and New York City . He attended

1911-626: The poetry book The Bridge by Hart Crane. In 1931, he made a photo series of Victorian houses in the Boston vicinity sponsored by Lincoln Kirstein. In May and June 1933, Evans took photographs in Cuba on assignment for Lippincott , the publisher of Carleton Beals ' The Crime of Cuba (1933), a "strident account" of the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado . There, Evans drank nightly with Ernest Hemingway , who lent him money to extend his two-week stay an additional week. His photographs documented street life,

1960-489: The presence of police, beggars and dockworkers in rags, and other waterfront scenes. He also helped Hemingway acquire photos from newspaper archives that documented some of the political violence Hemingway described in To Have and Have Not (1937). Fearing that his photographs might be deemed critical of the government and confiscated by Cuban authorities, he left 46 prints with Hemingway. He had no difficulties when returning to

2009-411: The private bank's 150th anniversary. In 1973 and 1974, Evans used the new Polaroid SX-70 instant camera for his last work; the company provided him with an unlimited supply of film, and the camera's simplicity and speed were easier for the aged photographer. The first definitive retrospective of his photographs, which "individually evoke an incontrovertible sense of specific places, and collectively

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2058-407: The published script was written by the film's director, Charles Laughton . Reports that Agee's screenplay for Hunter was not used have been proved false by the 2004 discovery of his first draft, which although 293 pages in length, contains many scenes included in the film that Laughton directed. Laughton seemed to have edited great parts of the script because it was too long. While not yet published,

2107-431: The star and Laughton. Letters and documents in the archive of Agee's agent Paul Kohner bear this out; they were documented by Laughton's biographer Simon Callow , whose BFI book about The Night of the Hunter sets this part of the record straight. Couchman, the author of a 2009 book about The Night of the Hunter , writes that Agee's screenplay would have been a film about six hours long, so Laughton had to cut and edit

2156-544: The summer of 1936, while on leave from the FSA, writer James Agee and he were sent by Fortune on assignment to Hale County, Alabama for a story the magazine subsequently opted not to run. In 1941, Evans' photographs and Agee's text detailing the duo's stay with three White tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression were published as the groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men . Its detailed account of three farming families paints

2205-530: The works is the use of original names in Cotton Tenants ; Agee assigned fictional names to the subjects of Famous Men to protect their identity. Agee left Fortune in 1937 while working on a book, then, in 1939, he took a book reviewing job at Time , sometimes reviewing up to six books per week; together, he and his friend Whittaker Chambers ran "the back of the book" for Time . In 1941, he became Time's film critic. From 1942 to 1948, he worked as

2254-434: Was awarded a Blue Ribbon at the 1980 American Film Festival. AGEE featured four of James Agee's friends—Dwight Macdonald, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Saudek , and John Huston —as well as the three women to whom James Agee had been married. In addition, Father James Harold Flye was a featured interviewee. President Jimmy Carter speaks about his favorite book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men . The Man Who Lives Here Is Loony ,

2303-672: Was first widely used in reference to the non-autobiographical In Cold Blood by Truman Capote but has since become associated with a range of works drawing openly from autobiography. The emphasis is on the creation of a work that is essentially true, often in the context of an investigation into values or some other aspect of reality. The books Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig and The Tao of Muhammad Ali by Davis Miller open with statements admitting to some fictionalising of events but state they are true "in essence". Walker Evans Many of his works are in

2352-406: Was his first contribution to a film that was completed and released. Agee's career as a movie scriptwriter was curtailed by his alcoholism . Nevertheless, he is one of the credited screenwriters on two of the most respected films of the 1950s: The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). His contribution to Hunter is shrouded in controversy. Some critics have claimed that

2401-625: Was the future poet and critic Robert Fitzgerald , with whom he later worked at Time . Agee was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Advocate and delivered the class ode at his commencement . After graduation, Agee was hired by Time Inc. as a reporter, and moved to New York City, where he wrote for Fortune magazine from 1932 to 1937, although he is better known for his later film criticism in Time and The Nation . In 1934, he published his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage , with

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