Collection of letters author, poet, screenwriter and film critic James Rufus Agee (1909 - 1955) and 1958 posthumous recipient of the Pulitzer for his autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), wrote to Episcopal priest Father James Harold Flye. Father Flye was both close friend and spiritual confidant. The letters span 30 years—from Agee's entrance to Phillips Exeter to his death in 1955.-Print ed.

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...

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...

"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...

“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...

Published in 1957, two years after its author's death at the age of forty-five, A Death in the Family remains a near-perfect work of art, an autobiographical novel that contains one of the most evocative depictions of loss and grief ever written. As Jay Follet hurries back to his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, he is killed in a car accident - a tragedy that destroys not only a life, but also the domestic happiness and contentment of a young family. A novel of great courage, lyric f...

The novel is based on the events that occurred to Agee in 1915 when his father went out of town to see his own father, who had suffered a heart attack. During the return trip, Agee's father was killed in a car accident. The novel provides a portrait of life in Knoxville, Tennessee, showing how such a loss affects the young widow, her two children, her atheist father and the dead man's alcoholicbrother.

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...