Let Us Now Praise Famous Men / A Death in the Family / Shorter Fiction

by James Agee, Michael Sragow (Editor)

A passionate literary innovator, eloquent in language and uncompromising in his social observation and his pursuit of emotional truth, James Agee (1909––1955) excelled as novelist, critic, journalist, and screenwriter. In his brief, often turbulent life, he left enduring evidence of his unwavering intensity, observant eye, and sometimes savage wit.

This Library of America volume collects his fiction along with his extraordinary experiment in what might be called prophetic journalism, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a collaboration with photographer Walker Evans that began as an assignment from Fortune magazine to report on the lives of Alabama sharecroppers, and that expanded into a vast and unique mix of reporting, poetic meditation, and anguished self-revelation that Agee described as “an effort in human actuality.” A 64-page photo insert reproduces Evans’s now-iconic photographs from the expanded 1960 edition.

A Death in the Family, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that he worked on for over a decade and that was published posthumously in 1957, recreates in stunningly evocative prose Agee’s childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the upheaval his family experienced after his father’s death in a car accident when Agee was six years old. A whole world, with its sensory vividness and social constraints, comes to life in this child’s-eye view of a few catastrophic days. It is presented here for the first time in a text with corrections based on Agee’s manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.

This volume also includes The Morning Watch (1951), an autobiographical novella that reflects Agee’s deep involvement with religious questions, and three short stories: “Death in the Desert,” “They That Sow in Sorrow Shall Not Reap,” and the remarkable allegory “A Mother’s Tale.”

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Photography, Short Stories, American, Journalism, Essays

818 pages, Hardcover

First published September 22, 2005

About the author

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 summer cottage two miles from Sewanee, Tennessee. Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys was run by Episcopal monks affiliated with the Order of the Holy Cross, and it was there that Agee's lifelong friendship with an Episcopal priest, Father James Harold Flye, began in 1919. As Agee's close friend and spiritual confidant, Flye was the recipient of many of Agee's most revealing letters.

Agee went to Knoxville High School for the 1924–1925 school year, then travelled with Father Flye to Europe. On their return, Agee moved to boarding school in New Hampshire, entering the class of 1928 at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, he was president of The Lantern Club and editor of the Monthly where his first short stories, plays, poetry and articles were published. Agee was admitted to Harvard University's class of 1932. He was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Advocate.

In 1951 in Santa Barbara, Agee, a hard drinker and chain-smoker, suffered the first two in a series of heart attacks, which ultimately claimed his life four years later at the age of 45. He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, New York.

Career
After graduation, he wrote for Fortune and Time magazines, although he is better known for his later film criticism in The Nation. In 1934, he published his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage.

In the summer of 1936, Agee spent eight weeks on assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans living among sharecroppers in Alabama. Agee turned the material into a book entitled, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). It sold only 600 copies before being remaindered.

In 1942, Agee became the film critic for Time and, at one point, reviewed up to six films per week. Together, he and friend Whittaker Chambers ran "the back of the book" for Time. He left to become film critic for The Nation. In 1948, however, he quit both magazines to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for Life Magazine about the great silent movie comedians, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon, which has been credited for reviving Keaton's career. As a freelance in the 1950s, he continued to write magazine articles while working on movie scripts, often with photographer Helen Levitt.

Agee was an ardent champion of Charlie Chaplin's then extremely unpopular film Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which has since become a film classic. He was also a great admirer of Laurence Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet, especially Henry V, for which he actually published three separate reviews, all of which have been printed in the collection Agee on Film.

Legacy
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, ignored on its original publication in 1941, has been placed among the greatest literary works of the 20th Century by the New York School of Journalism and the New York Public Library.

Reviews

[Kevin LaCamera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recondite, self-indulgent, evocative, fitful, inimitable, genius. Agee makes me cry.

Excerpt: “Knoxville: Summer of 1915," James Agee

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.

...It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt: a loud auto: a quiet auto: people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard, and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squaring with clowns in hueless amber. A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping; belling and starting, stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter; fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone: forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew.

Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose.

Low in the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes...

Parents on porches: rock and rock. From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.

The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.

On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there.…They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine,...with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

I tried to turn this book into a readers theatre piece. I gave up because I couldn't cut it down to two hours of material. I loved so much of it, every cut seemed like a crime, every omission seemed like a mortal sin.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, this took me months to read and I'm so glad I did. One of the most beautiful, profound, compassionate, and lovely writings I've ever read. Absolutely loved it, it may even be my new favorite book.

Here's my favorite passage:
On overalls:
"Finally, too; particularly athwart the crest and swing of the shoulders, of the shirts: this fabric breaks like snow, and is stitched and patched: these break and again are stitched and patched and ruptured, and stitches and patches are manifolded upon the stitches and patches, and more on these, so that at length, at the shoulders, the shirt contains virtually nothing of the original fabric and a man, George Gudger, I remember so well, and many hundreds of others like him, wears in his work on the power of his shoulders a fabric as intricate and fragile, and as deeply in honor of the reigning sun, as the feather mantle of a Toltec prince."

[Laura S]

Reading Agee was an experience. I deliberately use the phrase “reading Agee” instead of “reading this book” because that is the only way I can describe it….and it was rather exhausting….but in a good way. He had a lot of important things to say, but it was easy to get lost…not in a fantastical sense, but in way that reminded me over and over again that there is sometimes a thin line between madness and genius. Foremost, he had a prophetic voice, speaking out against racial issues and rural poverty. He was an award winning journalist for Time magazine and an influential film critic. but as a novelist he opined in a free-flow style. A keen observer of setting and atmosphere, he painted a word-picture with such sensuous detail that he spent 5 full pages describing a rooster crowing one early morning. In his full length book: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, he spent entire chapters describing the contents of a single room or the make of a set of clothing and I was left with as deep an impression of reading an entire biography of the person to whom they belonged without being formally introduced to them within the pages. Indeed, there are very few conversations documented at all, yet I do not think a more thorough account could have been written . At some point I will go back and read “A Death in the Family” since some say that’s his best, but not anytime soon! My brain hurts!

[Denise Barney · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Agee is not for the faint-of-heart. Much of his writing, especially Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the novella The Morning Watch have many "stream-of-conciousness" passages which, while lyrical and poetic, can be difficult to follow. In some cases, I just let my mind float along with the passage, trying to feel the emotional meaning rather than the literal one.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men started as an article about cotton tenant farmers in Alabama in 1936 for Fortune Magazine along with pictures by Walker Evans. Fortune rejected the article and pictures (which has resurfaced as Cotton Tenants: Three Families, available through archive.org). Mr. Agee and Mr. Walker lived with these families for three weeks during the summer of 1936 and recorded their daily lives: their housing, their food, their access to water, the work involved in growing and picking cotton, in growing corn, their relationship with their landlords, and the education (mostly lack thereof) the children received. The families were white; black tenant farming families were barely mentioned. The drudgery, the poverty, the lack of freedom (the tenant farmers rarely broke even) is depressing and the ramifications of the tenant farmer system still affect the rural areas of Alabama.

The Morning Watch takes place during one Holy Thursday night/Good Friday morning. The protagonist is a student at an Episcopal Catholic boarding school and, as is tradition, is awakened by the Father to pray before the Holy Eucharist for part of the night. He is joined by several of his schoolmates. He meditates on the Crucifixtion, on his own weaknesses and how his sins contribute to Christ's suffering on the Cross. He notices things, too, about the other boys, about what he is feeling, about the chapel he is in. At the end of their watch, the boys stay on. Finally, afraid of being punished for being gone past their allotted time, they decide to walk to the lake and go for an early morning swim. There is an encounter with a snake, which the protagonist kills. He now has to forgive himself for killing the snake and is reminded of how his own mother described his father's death.

Mr. Agee won the Pulitzer Prize (posthumously) for A Death in the Family. The novel is mostly autobiographical, although Mr. Agee records the thoughts of his mother, younger sister, and other members of his family as though he were an omniscent author. There are flashbacks to his toddlerhood, memories of activities with his father, including a visit to his great-great grandmother in the Tennessee hills, and descriptions of the neighborhood in Knoxville. Woven in the novel are threads about class conflict between the families of the mother (middle class) and the father (hill/country) and conflict between the type of religion practiced. A Death in the Family is more straightforward. Mr. Agee had been working on this novel for several years and had completed most of it before his death, so some editorial decisions had to be made, based on his notes and the drafts left.

This edition also includes three short stories written by Mr. Agee and published The Harvard Advocate while he was a student there, a Chronology (very helpful!), and Notes on the Texts. Mr. Agee lived a relatively short life, living large and hard, dying from a massive heart attack in a taxi in New York City at 54. Most of his writing was film reviews and movie scripts; this selection showcases works that would not translate easily to film.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the first book in this anthology, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." It's a rambling and lyrical text, formally transgressive in its structure (a mishmash of theatre, prose and verse poetry, journalism, memoir, creative nonfiction, classical allusions, and documentary photography). James Agee and Walker Evans give us a textured record of life in Jim Crow-era Alabama, showing the abject poverty of black and white residents and the racial tensions of the region. On a literary level, this book is an important work of Popular Front-era modernism — exploring themes of Marxism and class solidarity, but without a lockstep loyalty to the USSR or the Communist Party, and experimenting with new forms of prose. Plus Agee is a Christian, whereas many communists were (and are still) atheists.

Agee is an idiosyncratic, sui generis voice in American letters. I had to read "Famous Men" in a rush because I'm a grad student and have too many books to handle, but it is a book to savor.

The edition is handsomely produced, like all Library of America volumes. I wish LOA volumes included good contextual introductions, as do the Barnes & Noble, Routledge, Modern Library, and other classic book lines. Perhaps the LOA editors want the reader to focus on the text, and go elsewhere for additional information.

[Ryan Young · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have rarely encountered a more uneven pairing of material than the two novels included in this volume. I was reading A Death in the Family at the time I received word of my own grandmother's death and found it exceedingly poignant and comforting. There is simply no "right" way to grieve. Death is entirely alien to our conception of self, so of course it causes us to question nearly everything in our world. I felt a great connection to the young protagonist, and nearly every other character in the novel. I found Agee's treatment to be sensitive and fair.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, on the other hand, felt like something that was banged out on a tight deadline and suffered for want of an editor willing to stand up to the author. Certainly, there were flashes of brilliant prose and excruciatingly detailed descriptions, but many arguments were rambling, disjointed, and lent no support to the work as a whole. All that being said, I recognized echoes of some of the decorative and household details as being present in the lives of my great-grandparents so I give full credit for a faithful rendition of conditions as Agee found them. I found myself outraged on behalf of the poor farmers and their families, but also frustrated with the indulgent writing style.

[Jimgosailing · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this collection specifically for the “shorter fiction” included here that I’ve not seen elsewhere.

Death in the Desert is an interesting, though short, exploration of life and death and does one look out for one’s self or for others?

They That Sow in Sorrow Shall Reap is a short, and from what I’ve read elsewhere autobiographical, exploration of homosexuality

And A Mother’s Tale is a parable, possibly, about Christ and religion. “What’s a train?”

It is a shame Agee died so young; these glimpses at his fiction show true promise.

[reading originally completed 09/13 but placed here for grouping]

[Emily D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love the writing, the flow. Just a bit dated now.

[behsforensics]

Team owns Mother's Tale, A by Agee, James digitally.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bought this for the deep tracks, mainly the few short stories that aren't easily found anywhere else. There are three in this collection. The first is Death in the Desert which is my favorite of the three. It's the story about the moment we get co-opted in the wrongs of the world we live in. In this case, a hitchhiker doesn't protest when the driver of the car he is in refuses to pick up an African American walking in the middle of the desert, clearly suffering from the extreme climate. The hitchhiker is afraid he'll get kicked out of the car if he doesn't stay silent (opening himself up for a similar fate). Also the next car will probably pick this man up. "I was dependent upon this man's charity: that closed my mouth."
The second story was They That Sow in Sorrow Shall Reap. Not a great story, but it is classic Agee, using fiction as an investigation into his religious concerns. You either like this or you don't. The last story, A Mother's Tale, is a disturbing story, written from a deeply pessimistic place. Clearly written much later in his life.

[David LeGault · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've had this book on my stack for 3 years now, and after 2 or 3 previous attempts I've finally finished it. A lot of people refer to this book as the first true instance of what we'd call creative nonfiction, and although I'm not sure about that, it's easy to see its influence all over everything worth reading in the genre as it currently exists.

This book probably took longer for me to read than anything else I've ever read. The first 100 pages or so were difficult to crack (both in terms of voice and the non-action, an attempt at describing everything there is to be described about the homes of Alabama sharecroppers in the 1930's)

But once you get into a rhythm, get all the way into Agee's head, the book explodes into something unlike any other essay I've encountered. The movement is awe-inspiring: shifting from descriptions of the house to the impossibility of representing reality in words to attacks on journalism to failure to perfection to an Agee interview on writer's responsibilities to description to death to betrayal to God. The whole while, Agee's meandering off-topic, sometimes stopping mid-paragraph and simply starting over, and occasionally switching into a second person voice, implicating the reader in this project of turning the suffering lives of others into his own masterpiece.

And don't even get me started on the pictures!

Basically, this book is hard, sometimes painful, but it gets increasingly powerful as it accumulates. You owe it to yourself to read this.

[Carter West · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Re. "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"] Arduous, clotted, circuitous, fevered, unwittingly solipsistic, ultimately exasperating - yet, for all that, a great book. I bailed out a little over halfway through, at the point where I could no longer bear the forcing-together of blank verse and armchair epistemology. But Agee remains true to his quest to find a vehicle for expressing his inexpressible. He finds his encounter with three sharecropper families in a 1936 Alabama summer to be so elemental, so evocative, that it requires no less than "an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity." The tragedy here is that Agee's sense of the sublimity of his project comes to overwhelm its prosecution. Page after page, concerns over its nature and what it requires unspool endlessly, to the extent that relatively little room is left over for the project to actually sustain itself. The excesses of his intensely romantic soul starve out that simple exercise of the senses that might have grounded his approach to these tenant farmers - as is shown on those occasions when he allows sight, hearing, touch to operate without extraneous justifications. Still, for those with the patience to parse his sentences – a virtue I just don't have – Agee's great breathless spirit will reward them with a window onto passions of which other authors can render only a glimpse.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 4 out of 5]

For my reviews of the longer works in this volume, see the individual reviews for _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,_ _The Morning Watch,_ and _A Death in the Family._ The remaining three short stories are, for the most part, quite good. Two of the three are from Agee's Harvard days in the early 1930s and reveal that, though he had not yet reached his artistic maturity, he was a naturally talented writer. "Death in the Desert" is an attack on Southern racism that poses a moral quandary for those who sat (or continue to sit) by and watch it happening without protest. "Those Who Sow in Sorrow Shall Reap" does much the same thing for issues of labor and alternative sexual lifestyles in a small town. The very fine later story, "A Mother's Tale" (1952), is an allegory that adequately expresses Agee's ambivalence toward Christianity. I've never read an allegory like it, and for that reason it was of heightened interest for me. Agee's was certainly a unique and talented voice.

[Jim Leckband · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is always refreshing to read an author who has such a singular voice. He endows the mundane with the grace of myths. Obviously this is what he did in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", but it is also what he does in the other pieces in this book. In lesser hands the kinds of things he attempts would be ludicrous since it seems he grants the subject matter so much more weight than it seems to warrant - sharecroppers or the viewpoint of a child in a family death. One expects lush and grandiose prose and psychological depth in other things - wars/gods/love - the whole Russian novel thing.

But this is Agee's whole point - that any human's consciousness and life is worth everything a writer can summon to describe it - and the result is every bit as compelling as just about anything else ever written.

[Lloyd Fassett]

Read about "The Cotton Tenets" being published in The New York Times as a book. It was an unpublished article for Fortune magazine from about 1933, with Walker Evans as photograpgher, and predecesor to Famous Men. John Steinbeck had the same pattern in the same years with a newspaper article that preceded Grapes of Wrath with Dorothea Lang as photoghapher.

Library of America collections are the bomb because they include detailed year by year chronology of an author's life at the back so you have a lot more context about the author and their work than just the work itself.

[Felix · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of Agee's work came as a Christmas present a couple of years ago. Although I had read both A Death in the Family and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, getting this book caused me to re-read those works as well as some of the shorter fiction.

Simply reading the words again was reward enough, for Agee was a stylist of great power, and the stories were so immeasurably supported by the manner of their telling.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved _A Death in the Family_. When I first moved to Knoxville for my masters degree, everyone talked dropped Agee's name frequently...Agee this, Agee that; the street called Agee. I thought it was hype. It wasn't; this book is remarkable. Especially the thoughts of the two children. Brilliant.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book haunted me from the first reading (A Death in the Family), so I reread it in 2007. I still need to go back and read the rest of his compiled works included in this edition, but the writing style transported me into their neighborhood immediately.

I will probably read this several more times in my life.

[Jack Chipperfield]

Great writer loved Death in the Family-IN Let us now praise famous men Agee uses the technique of maddening detailed observations of the surroundings he brings out the tragic pain, poverty and dignity of the families. Frankly Walker Evans pictures tell the whole story.

[Ed Mcfadden · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was interesting in style but tediously unreadable. The short novel, A Death in The Family was a lovely look at the impact loss has from multiple perpsectives.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disturbing, problematic, but brilliant.

[Martha]

I am saving this book for Berlin...

[Sarah Surratt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Death in the Family is one of my favorite novels ever.

[Mont]

Let Us Now Praise
Haunting photos and impassioned text record the pain, humanity and terrible beauty of three sharecropper families in Alabama during the Depression.