James Agee

James Agee was an American novelist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 for his autobiographical book “A Death in the Family”. In the summer of 1936, the press group Time-Life hired Agee, accompanied by photographer Walker Evans, to report on the poor white families of Alabama. For six weeks, Agee and Evans lived with three impoverished sharecropper families. On his return, the article Agee delivered to its commissioner was refused. It eventually became a totally unclassifiable book, a cry of indignation and anger on behalf of these victims of the Great Depression, published in 1940 as “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”. In 1942, Agee became a film critic for Time and worked on screenplays including John Huston’s “African Queen” and Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter”. He died in New York in 1955 aged 45.