James Agee

James Agee wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which failed completely and is now considered one of the great American books, and drank himself to death at forty-five. He was a Tennessean whose father was killed in a car crash when he was six - the event he spent his life writing about - and he came out of Harvard into Fortune magazine, where he was a brilliant and unmanageable staff writer. In summer 1936 Fortune sent him and Walker Evans to Alabama to report on tenant farming; they lived with three families for eight weeks, and Agee came back with something the magazine could not print. The book that followed in 1941 is four hundred pages of agonised, self-interrogating prose about the impossibility of writing it at all, with Evans's photographs at the front and uncaptioned. It sold a few hundred copies. He wrote film criticism for Time and the Nation that is still read - he was among the first serious American critics to treat film as an art - and screenplays including The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter. A Death in the Family, the novel about his father, was unfinished when he died of a heart attack in a New York taxi, and won the Pulitzer posthumously in 1958. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was reissued in 1960 and found its readers twenty years late. He wrote the commentary for the documentary The Quiet One and reviewed film for the Nation without pay. The Night of the Hunter is the only film Charles Laughton directed. His letters to Father Flye, published in 1962, are read as a spiritual autobiography.

• Lived: 1909 CE – 1955 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: writer