James Agee (person)

"I know I am making the choice most dangerous to an artist in valuing life above art."
--James Agee

James Rufus Agee (1909-1955) wrote novels, short stories, poetry, film criticism, screenplays, and investigative journalism. He was a writer for Fortune magazine, a movie critic for Time and The Nation, and a film scriptwriter. He was never very famous during his lifetime. His greatest recognition came after his death when his posthumously published novel A Death in the Family won the Pulitzer Prize.

At the time of his death, in 1955, all of Agee's published works were out of print. Fifteen years later nearly everything Agee had ever written was available again and in demand, and new books were being published about him at a remarkable rate.

A Death in the Family, which recounts in poetic prose the tragic impact of a man's death on his wife and family, is usually believed to be about the death of Agee's father, who died when Agee was very young, and whose death deeply affected the writer.

James Agee's published works are:

• A Death in the Family (1957, Pulitzer Prize)
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (with Walker Evans)(1941), a prose commentary on tenant farmers in the South in the 1930s
• The Morning Watch (1954), a novel
• Agee on Film (2 vol., 1958-60), a collection of reviews, comments, and scripts
• Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (1962), a collection of letters to a former teacher
• Collected Poems (1968);
• Collected Short Prose (1969)