James Agee

Born on November 27, 1909, in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Hugh James Agee and Laura Tyler, James Rufus Agee was six years old when his father was killed in an automobile accident on a country road, the loss that would shape A Death in the Family forty years later. From age seven he and his sister were sent to boarding schools, and at Saint Andrew's near Sewanee he met Father James Harold Flye, the Episcopal priest who became his lifelong correspondent and confidant. Phillips Exeter and Harvard followed, where he edited the Advocate and delivered the class ode in 1932. Hired by Time Inc. on graduation, he wrote for Fortune through the 1930s and in the summer of 1936 spent eight weeks in Hubbard's Creek, Alabama, with photographer Walker Evans, living among three tenant families. The assignment never ran. Agee turned it into Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which sold six hundred copies before being remaindered and has since taken its place among the strangest and most luminous American books. He was Time's film critic from 1941 and a critic for The Nation from 1942, championed Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux when nobody else would, and wrote the screenplays for The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). Drink and tobacco wrecked him. A heart attack in Santa Barbara in 1951 was followed by another, fatal one. He died on May 16, 1955, at the age of forty-five, in the back of a taxi in Manhattan on the way to a doctor's appointment, A Death in the Family unfinished on his desk. It won the Pulitzer Prize the year after his death.

In the summer of 1936, Agee and photographer Walker Evans spent eight weeks in Hale County, Alabama, sleeping in the homes of three cotton tenant families, eating what they ate, learning their names before changing them for the book. Fortune killed the assignment. Agee spent five years turning it into something the magazine never wanted: uncompromising, five hundred pages long.