A Death in the Family (Author Biography)

Author Biography

James Rufus Agee was born on November 27, 1909, in Knoxville, Tennessee. As a boy, he was always called by his middle name, the name given to the main character in A Death in the Family. When he was six, Agee’s father died in an automobile accident. Agee was sent to boarding school in his childhood, then to Philips Exeter Academy, which was to become a strong influence throughout his life. He then went to Harvard University, where he received an associate’s degree in 1932. He married the first of his three wives the following year and went to work at Fortune, one of the country’s preeminent business magazines. Though Agee’s left-leaning politics disagreed with the magazine’s focus on finance, his work there gave him the opportunity to work on his poetry.

In 1936, Fortune sent Agee and photographer Walker Evans to Alabama to report on the lives of tenant farmers. It was the middle of the Great Depression, and the suffering and dignity that Evans and Agee saw in their poor uneducated subjects impressed them so much that, when the magazine rejected their subsequent article, they expanded it to book length. The book, titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), was ignored by a reading public that was focused on America’s coming involvement in World War II. Today, the book is considered to be one of the most important and moving documents available of that time.

While still working on the book, Agee branched out into another field of writing, that of movie reviewing. His reviews for Time and later for the Nation would in themselves have secured his place in the country’s literary heritage, bringing an intellectual approach to reviewing just as film was gaining respect as an art form. His reviews, collected after his death in the two-volume collection Agee on Film, are as enjoyable as they are instructive.

In 1951, Agee published The Morning Watch, which gained only lukewarm critical response. He then combined his storytelling skills with his understanding of film and began writing screenplays. His first script was for The African Queen, starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. It won Academy Award nominations for Agee and its director, John Huston. That same year, Agee suffered his first heart attack. Over the next few years, as he worked on A Death in the Family and his screenplay for the film Night of the Hunter, he suffered a series of heart attacks, eventually dying of heart failure on May 16, 1955.