Black and white photograph of American writer James Agee.

James Agee

(1909 - 1955)

After graduating from Harvard University in 1932, James Agee began writing for Time and Fortune. It was an unpublished story about sharecroppers for the latter that he and Walker Evans turned into Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published in 1941. Agee was also a film critic—he championed the “great, sad, motionless face” of Buster Keaton—and a scriptwriter for, among other films, The African Queen. His novel, A Death in the Family, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1958, three years after Agee had died from a heart attack in a taxi cab.

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