James Agee

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James Rufus Agee (born November 27, 1909 in Knoxville , Tennessee , † May 16, 1955 in New York City ) was an American poet , journalist , social activist, screenwriter and film critic . In the 1940s he was one of the most influential film critics in America .

Live and act

When James Agee was six years old, his father, Hugh James Agee, was killed in a car accident. This early tragic loss spurred him on to write the autobiographical novel A Death in the Family , which was published posthumously and in unfinished form in 1957 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize a year later . He spent most of his school education in various boarding schools. He then went to Harvard and then worked as a journalist for various newspapers. In addition to his daily journalistic work, he mainly wrote book and film reviews, which received widespread attention.

In 1936 Agee spent a few months with photographer Walker Evans at harvest workers in Alabama on behalf of Fortune magazine and wrote an article about it that was never published. Evans and Agee expanded the article into a photo book ( Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families , 1941), which has since been considered one of the most important photojournalistic documents of the American Depression .

Agee was a film critic for Time and Nation magazine from 1942 to 1948 and then worked as a freelance journalist and writer. In 1949 he wrote a lengthy article in Life about silent film comedians such as his friend Charlie Chaplin , Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton . Agee's praise and appreciation for Keaton heralded his rediscovery as a great comedian in the decades that followed. In the 1950s, Agee wrote the scripts for the two Hollywood classics, African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955), after he had made the poetic interim commentaries for the Oscar-nominated documentary One of the Silent ones in 1948 (The Quiet One) .

Agee was married three times and had four children, including the 1940-born writer and translator Joel Agee . He died of a heart attack in a New York taxi on the way to see his doctor at the age of 45. His autobiographical novel A Death in the Family was published posthumously in 1957 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize .

Works (selection)

  • 1934 Permit Me Voyage (poems)
  • 1941 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (social report, with photos by Walker Evans ). Houghton Mifflin, Boston, USA.
    • I want to praise the big men: 3 tenant families , German from Karin Graf; Munich: Schirmer-Mosel 1989. ISBN 3-88814-287-3 .
  • New edition: I want to praise the great men , The Other Library , Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-8477-0344-0 .
  • 1951 The Morning Watch (novel)
    • The morning watch , German by Ruth Malchow; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1964.
  • 1957 A Death in the Family (novel)
    • A butterfly flew up , German from Gerda von Uslar; Hamburg: Nannen 1962.
    • also as: A death in the family ; same translation, Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt 1991. ISBN 3-499-40086-3
    • New edition: A death in the family ; same translation, revised by Ingo Herzke; Munich CH Beck 2009. ISBN 978-3-406-58388-9
  • 1958 Agee on Film (1942-48 reviews)
  • 1960 All the Way Home (Tad Mosel's stage adaptation of A Death in the Family )
  • 1968 The Collected Poems of James Agee .
  • 1968 The Collected Short Prose of James Agee .
  • The tramp and the bomb. The movie Chaplin never made . Translated by Andrea Stumpf and Sven Koch. Diaphanes Verlag, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-03734-425-5 .
  • As I now realize Prose, scripts, projects. Translated from the English by Sven Koch and Andrea Stumpf. Zurich: Diaphanes, 2015.

Awards

Filmography

Scripts based on templates from other authors

Film adaptations of own works

  • 1962 - A butterfly flew up ( All the way home ) - Director: Alex Segal - based on the novel of the same name

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the entry in Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of American Authors . Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart et al. 2000, ISBN 3-476-01654-4 , p. 9. In contrast to other sources, the age of Agees at the time of his father's fatal accident is given here as seven years.
  2. ↑ See the entry in Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of American Authors . Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart et al. 2000, ISBN 3-476-01654-4 , p. 9.
personal data
SURNAME Agee, James
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Agee, James Rufus (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet, novelist, journalist, social activist, and film critic
DATE OF BIRTH November 27, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Knoxville , Tennessee
DATE OF DEATH May 16, 1955
Place of death New York City