James Rufus Agee (November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was an American novelist, screenwriter, journalist, poet, and film critic. In the 1940s he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
During his lifetime, Agee enjoyed only modest public recognition, but since his death his literary reputation has grown. In 1957 his novel, A Death in the Family (which was based on the events surrounding his father’s death), was published posthumously and in 1958 won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Agee’s reviews and screenplays have been collected in Agee on Film, which has been controversial not only because of the allegations concerning The Night of the Hunter, but because one of the Time reviews included in the first volume (of the film Roxie Hart) was not written by Agee.[2]
Agee’s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, ignored on its original publication in 1941, 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. Samuel Barber has set sections of “Descriptions of Elysium” from Permit Me Voyage to music, including the song “Sure On This Shining Night”; in addition, he set prose from the traditionally included “Knoxville” section of “A Death in the Family” in his work for soprano entitled “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.”
Books by Agee
A Death in the Family
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies
A Short, Intense Life
A Short, Intense Life (PBS)
James Rufus Agee was born on November 17, 1909, in Knoxville, Tennessee. The elder child of Hugh James Agee, descended from rugged Tennessee farming stock, and Laura Tyler, the product of a more educated background, would struggle throughout his life to balance the freewheeling legacy of his father with the more doctrinaire influence of his mother.
PBS content here.
New Yorker
New Yorker piece about Agee.
Agee Quotes
Agee Quotes