Author
James Agee
Birth Date
November 27, 1909
(45 Years)
Death Date
May 16, 1955
Associated Country
United States
James Agee (1909–1955) was an American novelist, journalist, poet, and film critic, known for his deeply personal and socially conscious writing. He was born in Knoxville, and his early life—especially the death of his father when he was young—had a lasting impact on his work.
Agee gained recognition for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a powerful collaboration with photographer Walker Evans that documents the lives of impoverished tenant farmers during the Great Depression. Though not widely appreciated at the time, it later became a landmark work of American literature and journalism.
He also worked as a film critic for Time and The Nation, earning respect for his insightful and passionate criticism. His novel A Death in the Family (published posthumously in 1957) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Agee died at the age of 45 from a heart attack, leaving behind a legacy as one of the most distinctive literary voices of his generation.
Agee gained recognition for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a powerful collaboration with photographer Walker Evans that documents the lives of impoverished tenant farmers during the Great Depression. Though not widely appreciated at the time, it later became a landmark work of American literature and journalism.
He also worked as a film critic for Time and The Nation, earning respect for his insightful and passionate criticism. His novel A Death in the Family (published posthumously in 1957) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Agee died at the age of 45 from a heart attack, leaving behind a legacy as one of the most distinctive literary voices of his generation.
Books
James Agee’s father died when he was just six years old, a loss immortalized in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Death in the Family. Three years later, Agee’s mother moved the mourning family from...
Cotton Tenants 2013
In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a four-hundred-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama at the height of the Great...
Set in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the early 20th century, A Death in the Family follows the quiet, close-knit Follet family as their lives are suddenly shattered by tragedy. When Jay Follet is killed in...
Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Agee and renowned photgrapher Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a landmark work of American photojournalism “renowned for its fusion of social...