James Rufus Agee (1909–55) was an American man of letters. In a brief but productive life, he wrote prolifically—spanning a variety of literary forms: poetry, novels, film criticism, screenplays, essays, and journalism.
Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Agee graduated from Harvard in 1932 and began his literary career writing for Fortune and Time magazines. His Permit Me Voyage (1934) was issued in the Yale Series of Younger Poets.
Agee wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) after touring the South with photographer Walker Evans. It is celebrated as a persuasive confirmation of the essential human dignity of impoverished sharecroppers during the 1930s. The book is now considered one of the most important literary works associated with the Great Depression.
During his lifetime, Agee was best known for his film criticism, especially in weekly reviews he wrote for The Nation, Time, and other journals; his film reviews were collected as Agee on Film (1958.) He also wrote the screenplays for The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955.)
Agee’s autobiographical poetic story A Death in the Family (1957; Pulitzer) was published posthumously.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by James Agee
It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying, that it could occur to an association of human beings drawn together through need and chance and for profit into a company, an organ of journalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of “honest journalism.”
—James Agee
Topics: Media
You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.
—James Agee
Topics: Tradition
He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things: a one-track mind near the track’s end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive…
—James Agee
Topics: Acting, Actors
A human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea.
—James Agee
I believe that every human being is potentially capable within his ‘limits’ of fully ‘realizing’ his potentialities; that this, his being cheated and choked of it, is infinitely the ghastliest, commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world can assure itself.
—James Agee
Topics: Potential
In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again.
—James Agee
Topics: Humanity
When he ran from a cop his transitions from accelerating walk to easy jog trot to brisk canter to headlong gallop to flogged-piston sprint…were as distinct and as soberly in order as an automatic gearshift.
—James Agee
Topics: Acting, Actors
As a whole part of psychological education it needs to be remembered that a neurosis can be valuable; also that adjustment to a sick and insane environment is of itself not health but sickness and insanity.
—James Agee
Topics: Insanity
Children, taught either years beneath their intelligence or miles wide of relevance to it, or both: their intelligence becomes hopelessly bewildered, drawn off its centers, bored, or atrophied.
—James Agee
Topics: Children
The goal is the same: life itself; and the price is the same; life itself.
—James Agee
Topics: Life
The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.
—James Agee
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