Showing results for "james agee"

Forty years after its original publication, James Agee's last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man's death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to b...

James Agee's *The Morning Watch* (1951) is a compressed, intensely lyrical novella about Richard, a twelve-year-old boy at a Southern Episcopal boarding school, who keeps vigil in the chapel during the hours before Easter morning. Through the child's fluctuating consciousness—part prayer, part fantasy, part moral self-interrogation—Agee examines sexuality, guilt, religious aspiration, and the painful emergence of adult awareness. Its richly tactile prose, shifting rhythms, and close psycho...

James Agee's A Death in the Family is a profoundly intimate, formally daring novel about the sudden death of Jay Follet and its consequences for his wife, Mary, their children, and the wider community of 1915 Knoxville, Tennessee. Drawing closely on Agee's own childhood experience, the narrative moves between domestic realism, lyrical interior monologue, shifting points of view, and vividly observed regional detail. Its sustained attention to grief—refracted through religious doubt, childh...

It’s difficult to overestimate the impact of the many new works by James Agee uncovered and published in the last twenty years. These previously unknown primary works have, in turn, encouraged a parallel explosion of critical evaluation and reevaluation by scholars, to which James Agee in Context is the latest contribution.This superb collection from well-known James Agee scholars features myriad approaches and contexts for understanding the author’s fiction, poetry, journ...

James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), created with photographer Walker Evans, is a landmark of American documentary literature. Commissioned originally by Fortune, it examines the lives of three Alabama sharecropping families during the Great Depression, combining ethnographic observation, political critique, meditative autobiography, and experimental prose. Evans's austere photographs and Agee's intensely lyrical, self-questioning narrative resist sentimental representations o...

Drawn mainly from the centennial anniversary symposium on James Agee held at the University of Tennessee in the fall of 2009, the essays of Agee at 100 are as diverse in topic and purpose as is Agee’s work itself. Often devalued during his life by those who thought his breadth a hindrance to greatness, Agee’s achievements as a poet, novelist, journalist, essayist, critic, documentarian, and screenwriter are now more fully recognized. With its use of previously unknown and recently...

Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Agee and renowned photgrapher Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a landmark work of American photojournalism “renowned for its fusion of social conscience and artistic radicality” (The New York Times)In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collabor...

“I’ll croak before I write ads or sell bonds—or do anything except write.”James Agee’s father died when he was just six years old, a loss immortalized in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Death in the Family. Three years later, Agee’s mother moved the mourning family from Knoxville, Tennessee, to the campus of St. Andrew’s, an Episcopal boarding school near Sewanee.There, Agee met Father James Harold Flye, who would become his history teacher. Th...

"Agee's prose poem captures the textural variety of Brooklyn in language that bears reading aloud for its lilt, melody, and pleasingly pungent vocabulary." — Booklist (starred review)For the first time in book form—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning authorForeword by Jonathan Lethem, author Motherless BrooklynIn 1939, James Agee was assigned to write an article on Brooklyn for a special issue of Fort...

The structure of most virgin forests in the western United States reflects a past disturbance history that includes forest fire. James K. Agee, an expert in the emergent field of fire ecology, analyzes the ecological role of fire in the creation and maintenance of natural western forests, focusing primarily on forest stand development patterns. His discussion of the natural fire environment and the environmental effects of fire is applicable to a wide range of temperate forests.

Decades after its original publication, James Agee’s last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man’s death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to be a ...

A new volume in the Liveright series of Cummings reissues, offset from the authoritative Complete Poems 1904-1962.The poems in Etcetera were discovered in three Cummings manuscript collections and selected from more than 350 unpublished pieces. Many of the poems are from his early years and all convey his freshness and youthful spirit, exhibiting his celebration of love and delight in common natural phenomena. Etcetera was first published...