The Making of James Agee

The Making of James Agee PDF Author: Hugh Davis
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1572336072
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
"In The Making of James Agee, Hugh Davis takes a comprehensive look at Agee's career, showing the interrelatedness of his concerns as a writer. A full view of Agee's oeuvre, Davis argues, illuminates its deeply political nature and reveals a debt to various sources, particularly European surrealism, that have been little noted by previous Agee scholars." "Davis challenges the view of Agee that has persisted since his death - that he is best understood primarily as a romantic individualist at odds with convention and the literary mainstream - and argues that this myth was largely constructed by friends and associates who were so immersed in the tenets of modernism that they distorted Agee's work (and aesthetic intent) in an attempt to purify it in modernist terms. In revealing a writer of far greater complexity than the myth allows, Davis explores, for example, the leftist poetry that Agee wrote in the 1930s, which was almost completely suppressed by his editors. He also throws a fresh light on Agee's collaboration with photographer Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and reevaluates A Death in the Family in light of recent scholarship that has produced an almost entirely new version of the novel, one much closer to Agee's original intentions."--BOOK JACKET.

The Making of James Agee

The Making of James Agee PDF Author: Hugh Davis
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1572336072
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book

Book Description
"In The Making of James Agee, Hugh Davis takes a comprehensive look at Agee's career, showing the interrelatedness of his concerns as a writer. A full view of Agee's oeuvre, Davis argues, illuminates its deeply political nature and reveals a debt to various sources, particularly European surrealism, that have been little noted by previous Agee scholars." "Davis challenges the view of Agee that has persisted since his death - that he is best understood primarily as a romantic individualist at odds with convention and the literary mainstream - and argues that this myth was largely constructed by friends and associates who were so immersed in the tenets of modernism that they distorted Agee's work (and aesthetic intent) in an attempt to purify it in modernist terms. In revealing a writer of far greater complexity than the myth allows, Davis explores, for example, the leftist poetry that Agee wrote in the 1930s, which was almost completely suppressed by his editors. He also throws a fresh light on Agee's collaboration with photographer Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and reevaluates A Death in the Family in light of recent scholarship that has produced an almost entirely new version of the novel, one much closer to Agee's original intentions."--BOOK JACKET.

Cotton Tenants

Cotton Tenants PDF Author: James Agee
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612192130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographer In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a 400-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama, at the height of the Great Depression. The book shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Critic Lionel Trilling called it the “most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.” The origins of Agee and Evans’s famous collaboration date back to an assignment for Fortune magazine, which sent them to Alabama in the summer of 1936 to report a story that was never published. Some have assumed that Fortune’s editors shelved the story because of the unconventional style that marked Famous Men, and for years the original report was presumed lost. But fifty years after Agee’s death, a trove of his manuscripts turned out to include a typescript labeled “Cotton Tenants.” Once examined, the pages made it clear that Agee had in fact written a masterly, 30,000-word report for Fortune. Published here for the first time, and accompanied by thirty of Walker Evans’s historic photos, Cotton Tenants is an eloquent report of three families struggling through desperate times. Indeed, Agee’s dispatch remains relevant as one of the most honest explorations of poverty in America ever attempted and as a foundational document of long-form reporting. As the novelist Adam Haslett writes in an introduction, it is “a poet’s brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice.”

James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men / A Death in the Family / Shorter Fiction (LOA #159)

James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men / A Death in the Family / Shorter Fiction (LOA #159) PDF Author: James Agee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 920

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Book Description
Contains nonfiction work such as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men along with the Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Death In The Family and other fictional material.

Complete Film Criticism

Complete Film Criticism PDF Author: James Agee
Publisher: Collected Works of James Agee
ISBN: 9781621902584
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
-From 1942 to 1948, James Agee wrote rather voluminous move reviews for Time and The Nation at a time when motion pictures captured wide swaths of the viewing public. This fifth volume in the Works of James Agee series includes Maland's historical introduction and his textual introduction as well as Agee's reviews from Time, The Nation, other published film criticism, and unpublished articles. Agee's Time reviews have never been published in their entirety, and early reviews from Agee's time at Exeter Academy are also included---

James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism (LOA #160)

James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism (LOA #160) PDF Author: James Agee
Publisher: Library of America James Agee
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 780

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Book Description
[The author] had a passion for art in all its aspects, but it was the new art of the movies that was his greatest inspiration as a critic. [This book] has long been recognized as the single most influential American book about movies. Witty, probing, lacerating his moral criticisms, eloquent in his admiration of filmmakers from Charlie Chaplin to John Huston, [the author] is a critic who engages the reader no matter what subject he is writing about.-Back cover.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men PDF Author: James Agee
Publisher: Collected Works of James Agee
ISBN: 9781621900306
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"An Annotated Edition of the James Agee--Walker Evans Classic, with Supplementary Manuscripts"--Cover

Chaplin and Agee

Chaplin and Agee PDF Author: John Wranovics
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Trade
ISBN: 9781403973030
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Chaplin and Agee charts the friendship between James Agee, author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Pulitzer Prize-winning A Death in the Family and screenwriter for American classics including The African Queen, and Charlie Chaplin, who starred in a staggering number of films from 1914 to 1967. This friendship emerged in the midst of the tumult of the 1940s and 1950s, with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, McCarthyism and blacklisting. In print here for the first time is Agee's first screenplay, The Tramp's New World, lost until recently. The striking screenplay--a comedy "so dark it was without precedent"--was written for Chaplin's tramp character and set in post-apocalyptic New York. Chaplin and Agee also features many previously unpublished letters and photographs. As the story moves from Hollywood to Greenwich Village, these two figures come to life, revealing the untold story of the great bond between two influential twentieth-century artists.

James Agee Rediscovered

James Agee Rediscovered PDF Author: James Agee
Publisher: Univ Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572333550
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
"James Agee Rediscovered, edited by Michael A. Lofaro and Hugh Davis, gives a new and unique perspective on this prolific writer. With this book, the editors have put together an untarnished and unfettered collection of previously unpublished manuscripts of one of America's most intriguing authors. Featuring various drafts and fragments of Agee's manuscripts from University of Tennessee Special Collections, the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and the James Agee Trust, this book reveals the inner thoughts and creative sensibilities of an eclectic writer." "James Agee Rediscovered consists of journal entries, drafts of original material, and heretofore undiscovered literary works, as well as nineteen previously unpublished photos by Walker Evans."--BOOK JACKET.

And Their Children After Them

And Their Children After Them PDF Author: Dale Maharidge
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 9781583226575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 1990 In And Their Children After Them, the writer/photographer team Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson return to the land and families captured in James Agee and Walker Evans’s inimitable Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, extending the project of conscience and chronicling the traumatic decline of King Cotton. With this continuation of Agee and Evans’s project, Maharidge and Williamson not only uncover some surprising historical secrets relating to the families and to Agee himself, but also effectively lay to rest Agee’s fear that his work, from lack of reverence or resilience, would be but another offense to the humanity of its subjects. Williamson’s ninety-part photo essay includes updates alongside Evans’s classic originals. Maharidge and Williamson’s work in And Their Children After Them was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction when it was first published in 1990.

The Stone World

The Stone World PDF Author: Joel Agee
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612199550
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A Washington Post Best Fiction Book of 2022 From the son of acclaimed author James Agee, a haunting novel depicting an American boy’s childhood in Mexico, ensconced in a world comprised of communist European exiles, local union activists, street children, and avant-garde artists like Frida Kahlo. Joel Agee’s hallucinatory first novel begins in a house with a large garden in an unnamed Mexican town in the late 1940s, where six-and-a-half-year-old Peter reads, dreams, and plays with his friends. He is a nascent explorer, artist, philosopher, mystic, and scientist. His world is still new, not yet papered over with received knowledge. And the actual world around him is a unique one in history: a community of leftist emigrés who have found refuge in Mexico from the Nazi and fascist regimes of Europe, rubbing shoulders with Mexican labor activists and leftists such as Frida Kahlo. But the emigrés long for home — including Peter’s step-father, who wants to return to his native Germany. Going back to Europe may not be safe for any of them yet, however, which gives rise to anguished arguments among Peter’s parents’s and their tight group of friends. And slowly, Peter begins to comprehend that his world may be turned upside down – that he might be forced to take leave of everyone he knows: his best friend, Arón; his father’s friend Sándor, who talks about revolution and performs magic tricks; and Zita, the family’s live-in-maid, who has taught him the consoling mysteries of prayer . . . Steeped in the magic and myths of childhood — yet haunted by a harsh adult world bedeviled by instability and political turmoil — Joel Agee’s The Stone World is an unforgettable portrait of a family that will inevitably invite comparison with another classic family story, that of his father James Agee’s A Death in the Family.