James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), created with photographer Walker Evans, is a landmark of American documentary literature. Commissioned originally by Fortune, it examines the lives of three Alabama sharecropping families during the Great Depression, combining ethnographic observation, political critique, meditative autobiography, and experimental prose. Evans's austere photographs and Agee's intensely lyrical, self-questioning narrative resist sentimental representations o...

James Agee's *The Morning Watch* (1951) is a compressed, intensely lyrical novella about Richard, a twelve-year-old boy at a Southern Episcopal boarding school, who keeps vigil in the chapel during the hours before Easter morning. Through the child's fluctuating consciousness—part prayer, part fantasy, part moral self-interrogation—Agee examines sexuality, guilt, religious aspiration, and the painful emergence of adult awareness. Its richly tactile prose, shifting rhythms, and close psycho...

James Agee's A Death in the Family is a profoundly intimate, formally daring novel about the sudden death of Jay Follet and its consequences for his wife, Mary, their children, and the wider community of 1915 Knoxville, Tennessee. Drawing closely on Agee's own childhood experience, the narrative moves between domestic realism, lyrical interior monologue, shifting points of view, and vividly observed regional detail. Its sustained attention to grief—refracted through religious doubt, childh...

"Agee's prose poem captures the textural variety of Brooklyn in language that bears reading aloud for its lilt, melody, and pleasingly pungent vocabulary." — Booklist (starred review)For the first time in book form—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning authorForeword by Jonathan Lethem, author Motherless BrooklynIn 1939, James Agee was assigned to write an article on Brooklyn for a special issue of Fort...

This portrait of poverty-stricken Southern tenant farmers during the Great Depression has become one of the most influential books of the past century.In the summer of 1936, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of white sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration—and a watershed literary event.Let Us No...

“I’ll croak before I write ads or sell bonds—or do anything except write.”James Agee’s father died when he was just six years old, a loss immortalized in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Death in the Family. Three years later, Agee’s mother moved the mourning family from Knoxville, Tennessee, to the campus of St. Andrew’s, an Episcopal boarding school near Sewanee.There, Agee met Father James Harold Flye, who would become his history teacher. Th...

Forty years after its original publication, James Agee's last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man's death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to b...

Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Agee and renowned photgrapher Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a landmark work of American photojournalism “renowned for its fusion of social conscience and artistic radicality” (The New York Times)In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collabor...

Decades after its original publication, James Agee’s last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man’s death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to be a ...

The writer whom Fran Lebowitz compared to the author of The Great Gatsby, calling him “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald,” makes his Penguin Classics debut with this beautiful deluxe edition of his best-loved book.One of the great novels of small-town American life, Appointment in Samarra is John O’Hara’s crowning achievement. In December 1930, just before Christmas, the Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, social circuit is electrified with parties and dances. A...

**A PBS NewsHour/New York Times Book Club PickA NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION "5 UNDER 35" HONOREEWINNER OF THE 2017 KIRKUS PRIZEWINNER OF THE NYPL'S YOUNG LIONS FICTION AWARDFINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE LEONARD PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZEA dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the plac...

"Something close to magic." The Los Angeles TimesThe astonishing novel of a young boy's life in the New York City of the 1930s, a stunning recreation of the sights, sounds, aromas and emotions of a time when the streets were safe, families stuck together through thick and thin, and all the promises of a generation culminate in a single great World's Fair . . .