James Agee Rediscovered: The Journals for 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men' and Other New Manuscripts

by Michael A. Lofaro (Editor), James Agee

Novelist, journalist, film critic, poet, and activist James Agee (1909?1955) produced an impressive array of literary works spanning three decades. His poems, novels, essays, works of criticism, and screenplays gave profound social insights into the Depression-ridden 1930s and war-torn 1940s, and scholars study and debate his work to this day. Agee, a Tennessee native, is arguably the most important literary figure from the state.James Agee Rediscovered, edited by Michael A. Lofaro and Hugh Davis, gives a newand unique perspective on this prolific writer. With this book, the editors have puttogether an untarnished and unfettered collection of previously unpublished manuscripts of one of America?s most intriguing authors.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 the University of Tennessee Collections Library, 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. Lofaro and Davis compiled this collection with a minimum of editorial intrusion. The result is an untainted glimpse of Agee at his creative best.Using his masterwork 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men' as its focal point, the collection covers all aspects of Agee?s literary career. Readers will discover Agee?s thoughts on topics ranging from love to the art of protest, from Charlie Chaplin to race relations.James Agee Rediscovered is a major addition to the field of literary biography.Devotees of Agee, as well the literary curious, will be fascinated by this raw look at a major literary talent.

488 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1992

Reviews

[Ron · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the second edition, printed in 1997 by UGA press. It is mainly about the Agee Week Conference at St. Andrews School in October, 1972 which included Agee's contemporaries, near contempary personal friends and aquaintances as well as evaluations of his literature and his critics. There were major panel discussions by his contenporaies including /Robert Fitzgerald, Andrew Lytle, Dwight MacDonald, Fredrick Manfred, and Walker Percy. One sentence in the preface is germane to our unnderstanding of what Agee attempted to do in his writing which may agree with some of the criticism of his methods and also endorse some of the statements that portray him as one of the great intellectual writers of the early to mid 20th century where he joined with a small group of Hemmingway, Fitzgeralds, Eliot, O'Connor, Welty, Woolf, Joyce, Proust and Freud top flight writers. "During the Second World War at the Nation in an atmosphere of enforced patroitism, "Agee's refusal to reveal a distinct political leaning isolated him from his peers" Bergreen p 276. While at Fortune a few years before this period he avoided the left-wing sympathy of many of his peers and even more diligently he resisted the quasi-religious and conservative leaning drift of American culture.
Agee's faith in mankind and his moral persuasions connected him with a tradition of writing going back to Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane and to Emerson and Thoreau and in Europe to Coleridge, Yates, and Chesterton and their Romanticism. Temporary end of review- trying to gather all of the current books of Agee with complete reviews of these books and compare with the three or four books written by Lofaro and Davis and show where they have grossly rewritten the value of James Agee's work and his great contributions to the culture of literature in the 30s, 40s and 50s. This book is rated one star because Michael Lofaro has taken over the work of James Agee and has tried to make it his work. Instead of making it his work, he has managed to make the work of James Agee a disgrace by changing the tone of "A Death in the Family" from a book that was written to show compassion and the strength of his father to a more mystical and hard book that condemns Agee's family. Lozano bases his work on copies of the book which were tied up in the Agee estate for fifty years. He says it is this hard work that has brought out the true book that Agee had intended to publish. It is obvious that Lofaro has gone to all this trouble to publish the new version to show the many talents that the new version of he book adds to Agee's books, essays and reviews. What Lofaro means by this is he can now republish much of Agee's work and rake in all of the dollars that these books will bring in for one Michael Lofaro. This is a travesty of the Agee Canon and someone at the University of Tennessee should put a stop to it. It would be a waste of good tar and feathers to send Lofaro down the railroad track.