AGEE, JAMES

born Nov. 27, 1909, Knoxville, Tenn., U.S. died May 16, 1955, New York, N.Y. American poet, novelist, and writer for and about motion pictures. One of the most influential American film critics in the 1930s and '40s, he applied rigorous intellectual and aesthetic standards to his reviews, which appeared anonymously in Time and signed in The Nation. Agee grew up in Tennessee's Cumberland Mountain area, attended Harvard University, and wrote for Fortune and Time after he graduated in 1932. Permit Me Voyage, a volume of poems, appeared in 1934. For a proposed article in Fortune, Agee and the photographer Walker Evans lived for about six weeks among sharecroppers in Alabama in 1936. The article never appeared, but the material they gathered became a book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), illustrated by Evans and accompanied by lyrical prose in which Agee dealt with both the plight of the people and his subjective reaction to it. From 1948 until his death, Agee worked mainly as a film scriptwriter, notably for The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). His novel A Death in the Family (1957), which is about the effect of a man's sudden death on his six-year-old son and the rest of his family, and his novella The Morning Watch (1951), on the religious experiences of a 12-year-old boy, are both autobiographical. A Death in the Family was adapted for the stage as All the Way Home (1960; filmed 1963). His other works include Agee on Film (1958), collected reviews; Agee on Film II (1960), consisting of five film scripts; and Letters to Father Flye (1962), which is a collection of his letters to a former teacher and lifelong friend.