Agee, << AY jee, >> James (1909-1955), was an American writer. His childhood in Tennessee served as the setting for his short novel The Morning Watch (1951). A Death in the Family is a poetic novel based on his earliest years in Knoxville, where he was born on Nov. 27, 1909. The work was published in 1957, after his death on May 16, 1955. It won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Tad Mosel adapted the novel into a play, All the Way Home (1960), which won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Agee collaborated with photographer Walker Evans on a study of white tenant farmers during the Great Depression. Evans’ pictures and Agee’s text were published as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). During the 1940’s, Agee reviewed movies for Time and The Nation magazines. Beginning in 1948, he wrote several screenplays, including scripts for The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). His film reviews and essays were published in Agee on Film (1958). A second Agee on Film volume, published in 1960, has five of his screenplays. In 2005, the Library of America published two collections of Agee’s writings, Film Writing and Selected Journalism and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, and Shorter Fiction.
