James Agee

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James Agee


Born
in Knoxville, Tennessee, The United States
November 27, 1909

Died
May 16, 1955

Genre


Noted American writer and critic James Rufus Agee collaborated with photographer Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a bleak depiction of rural poverty and posthumously published his novel A Death in the Family (1957).

This author, journalist, poet, screenwriter in the 1940s most influenced films in the United States. His autobiographical work won a Pulitzer Prize.

Life
Born at Highland Avenue and 15th Street (renamed James Agee Street in 1999) to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler. When Agee was six years of age in 1915, his father died in an automobile accident. From the age of seven, he and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in boarding schools. The most influential of these was located near his mother's
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Average rating: 3.91 · 23,651 ratings · 2,463 reviews · 95 distinct worksSimilar authors
A Death in the Family

3.89 avg rating — 17,504 ratings — published 1957 — 190 editions
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

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3.97 avg rating — 3,997 ratings — published 1941 — 97 editions
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Cotton Tenants: Three Families

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4.01 avg rating — 546 ratings — published 2013 — 14 editions
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Agee on Film: Criticism and...

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4.26 avg rating — 205 ratings — published 1960 — 27 editions
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Me...

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4.29 avg rating — 201 ratings — published 2005 — 4 editions
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The Morning Watch

3.65 avg rating — 217 ratings — published 1950 — 32 editions
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Letters of James Agee to Fa...

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4.06 avg rating — 142 ratings — published 1971 — 39 editions
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Film Writing and Selected J...

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4.34 avg rating — 88 ratings — published 2005 — 6 editions
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Brooklyn Is: Southeast of t...

3.76 avg rating — 84 ratings — published 2005 — 5 editions
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Collected Poems

3.51 avg rating — 53 ratings — published 1968 — 19 editions
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More books by James Agee…
Agee on Film, Vol. 1: Essay... Agee on Film, Vol. 2: Five ... Agee on Film: Criticism and...
(3 books)
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4.19 avg rating — 263 ratings

Quotes by James Agee  (?)
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“Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?”
James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

“How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. So far, so much between, you can never go home again. You can go home, it's good to go home, but you never really get all the way home again in your life. And what's it all for? All I tried to be, all I ever wanted and went away for, what's it all for?

Just one way, you do get back home. You have a boy or a girl of your own and now and then you remember, and you know how they feel, and it's almost the same as if you were your own self again, as young as you could remember.

And God knows he was lucky, so many ways, and God knows he was thankful. Everything was good and better than he could have hoped for, better than he ever deserved; only, whatever it was and however good it was, it wasn't what you once had been, and had lost, and could never have again, and once in a while, once in a long time, you remembered, and knew how far you were away, and it hit you hard enough, that little while it lasted, to break your heart.”
James Agee, A Death in the Family
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“And 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, Cotton Tenants: Three Families

Polls

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What shall we read in July, 2020? Books published 1980 or before.

 
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