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Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes
In 1939, James Agee (1909-55) wrote a 10,000-word piece about Brooklyn for Fortune magazine. The editors shelved the article because of "creative differences"; apparently, Agee's finely detailed rhapsody didn't fit the editors' designs for a New York City special issue. In any case, it remained unpublished until 1968, when it appeared with the somewhat incongruous title Southeast of the Island. With this edition, a new generation of readers will be introduced to perhaps the finest prose description of Brooklyn, that singular borough.
64 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2005
8 people are currently reading
181 people want to read
About the author
James Agee
98 books288 followersNoted 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.
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.
Ratings & Reviews
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Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
September 24, 2008
It's as though William Faulkner knocked back a few shots, got a livery-cab guy to drive him around my neighborhood, then crammed all his observations into a long diary entry and mailed it to my house, and it still smelled a little like booze when I opened it.
(In reality, it was a birthday gift from my friend Nicole, but given the American High Modernist combo of rambling metaphor and tonal intimacy in this amazing 49-page book, the first sentence is my story, and I'm stickin' to it.)
(In reality, it was a birthday gift from my friend Nicole, but given the American High Modernist combo of rambling metaphor and tonal intimacy in this amazing 49-page book, the first sentence is my story, and I'm stickin' to it.)
August 5, 2008
Amazing, startling descriptions of our city that somehow don't tire after fifty or so pages.
Read
June 17, 2025"He would work a suit into fitting him perfectly by the simple method of not taking it off much."
- Walker Evans on James Agee
This longish essay was written in 1939, around the same time as the great and unclassifiable Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The closest comparison I can think of to that book is Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, about modernity in 1960s Paris rather than tenant farming in Depression-era Alabama, but a work with the similarly impossible goal of really being about everything the author can think of - subjectivity and objectivity, politics and philosophy, trivial minutiae, consciousness itself - and making this expansion seem like a moral imperative rather than solipsism or a lack of discipline.
This small book is not as ambitious as all that, though it is similar in style and outlook. It was commissioned and rejected by the same publication (Fortune), and ultimately (posthumously) published 30 years later in Esquire. It is also included in The Collected Short Prose. Worth hunting down in whatever form.
- Walker Evans on James Agee
This longish essay was written in 1939, around the same time as the great and unclassifiable Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The closest comparison I can think of to that book is Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, about modernity in 1960s Paris rather than tenant farming in Depression-era Alabama, but a work with the similarly impossible goal of really being about everything the author can think of - subjectivity and objectivity, politics and philosophy, trivial minutiae, consciousness itself - and making this expansion seem like a moral imperative rather than solipsism or a lack of discipline.
This small book is not as ambitious as all that, though it is similar in style and outlook. It was commissioned and rejected by the same publication (Fortune), and ultimately (posthumously) published 30 years later in Esquire. It is also included in The Collected Short Prose. Worth hunting down in whatever form.
December 24, 2021
Jim can pour out the pyrotechnique like a broken spigot. Oftentimes it works (select dollops in the film criticism and the novel); here, as in his poetry, it’s too chewy and exhausts me. Real purty La La Land of BK though.
November 3, 2024
Brooklyn captured in prosetry.
Different from the Brooklynn of my youth yet quite similar. The dozen or so years and a war made the beginning of a new phase. But he captures its soul.
Different from the Brooklynn of my youth yet quite similar. The dozen or so years and a war made the beginning of a new phase. But he captures its soul.
May 5, 2021
Short, but sweet. Brooklyn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The greatest city in the world
The greatest city in the world
May 28, 2013
I don't know whether or how much to be creeped out by this portrait of Brooklyn, 1968, as an organism seething with other organisms. Read alongside Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, obviously, and Ship of Fools. with which I find it shares some thematic and descriptive affinities.
Read
May 31, 2016A wonderful gem of a book, written in 1939, the beginning of the modern age, this book could have been written today. Full of life and exaltation, reminiscent of Walt Whitman, this amazing little piece paints a uniquely American picture of the polyglot borough that I was unable to put down. The language takes your breath away. This is a book of light, space, air and life. Read it till the very last line.
August 24, 2014
A song, a lyric about Brooklyn. and its sense of inferiority, superiority, identity and dependence vis a vis Manhattan. I'm not sure I'd be as lyrical as Agee about Brooklyn in 1968, but it must be as diverse and polyglot as any place on earth--and a breeder of far more than its share of talented and driven human beings.
December 23, 2008
Man drives through Brooklyn in search of a period, finding only semicolons. A good reminder of when Red Hook was not a nice place, and working families lived in W'burg. Agee as usual is a slightly unhinged, whiskey-fueled, heartfelt observer of the American demos, and god bless his soul for that.
May 9, 2012
Fifty pages of Whitmanesque intensity. The perfect thing to have while visiting the borough and wheeling around throughout its many, many neighborhoods.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews