James Agee - (1909-1955)
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Tennessee State University in Tennessee
I. Biography
Tennessee is known for its many diverse authors. An author that is found to be critically diverse is James Rufus Agee. Agee was not only an author; he was also a novelist, poet, journalist, film critic, and screenwriter. Agee was a brilliant man. Agee is best known for his novel, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and an unfinished novel, A Death in the Family.
Agee was born on November 27, 1909, in Knoxville, Tennessee, to his father Hugh James Agee, a tall lanky man, and his mother Laura Agee, an attractive lady with dark hair and large brown eyes. Unfortunately, when Agee was only five years old, a death in the family occurred. His father Hugh Agee was killed in a car accident. Although this death was tragic, it later proved to play a major role in his career.
After the death of his father, Agee, his mother and his sister moved to a place near St. Andrews. For five years, Agee attended St. Andrews and he developed his close, lifelong personal relationship with Father Flye. Letters that he wrote to Father Flye throughout his life played a huge part in his life. Agee wrote a novel dealing with the letters which he called Letters to Father Flye.
In 1931, while attending Harvard University, Agee fell under the influence of Professor I. A. Richards. Professor Richard's theories about using language to embody physical reality greatly affected Agee's writing and helped him to produce Permit MeVoyage.
Unfortunately, it was not until after Agee's death that he received much recognition for his works. From 1950 to 1955 James Agee suffered from many heart attacks. On May 16, 1955, Agee suffered from a series of heart attacks. Consequently, Agee died later that day while riding in a taxicab in New York City. Agee was survived by his wife, Mia Agee, and his daughter, Julia Agee. It was not until two years after Agee's death that A Death in the Family was published. Agee's work was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1958.
After reading some of Agee's works, one could understand why Agee was awarded the Pulitzer Prize even after his death; however, one wonders why it took so long for his work to be recognized. Agee's works allow the reader to visualize each and every aspect of his writing. Being able to allow your readers to paint a picture in their heads says a great deal about Agee. Most critics find Agee's works to be peculiar. Others find his work interesting and alluring. Agee however, was unable to enjoy the compliments, awards, critical acclaim, and accolades that he so richly deserved.
II. Commentary from Other Authors
As Leslie A. Fielder states, "I think, that Agee's talent is peculiarly visual, that the world comes to him in sharp, fragmented sights-all detailed foreground. He paints his scenes sometimes like a miniaturist, and obscures both the kind of infinitely receding forward necessary to the novel."
As one can see his work is looked upon as ingenious. He was also looked upon by his peers and associates as a humble man. Alfred Kazin said, "Whenever Agee had to state his occupation, he simply put down 'writer'— not journalist or novelist or poet." Agee's strengths seen by one of his peers was journalistic and popular media. As Krazin also stated, "Agee was a writer who actually did better in popular and journalistic media where a chance to create something out of immense tenderness and his high sense of comedy than when he let himself go in purely speculative lyricism."
Many writers found Agee's work to be very passionate and very visible but at the same time to have simplicity. As Richard Hayes stated, "Though a poet in his resonance and quality, Agee found, in the loser prose evocation, an ideal form for his sensibility. In his homage to images of pastoral simplicity, he invoked a rhetoric heavy with baroque sinuosity, courtly in its posture and eloquence. It is a language with a moral as well as an esthetic intention; against an archetypal modern consciousness, fragmentary complacent, desiccated with rationality. Agee's language sets a passionate unity."
Many writers and critics gave him credit for his work after his death in 1955. Dwight Macdonald said, "I had always thought of Agee as the poet's eye for detail."
II. Sources
Fiedler, Leslie A. "Encountering with Death." The New Republic, 1957: 25-26.
Hayes, Richard. "Rhetoric of Slendor." Commomweal 19 Sept 1958: 591.
Kazin, Alfred. "Good-by to James Agee." Contemporaries Atlantic 1962: 185-187.
Macdonald, Dwight. "James Agee." The New Yorker 16 Nov 1957: 143-159.
This essay was submitted by a student of Judith Broadbent, a college teacher in Tennessee and Kentucky.