James Agee

James Agee was born in 1909 in Knoxville, Tennessee. His father's death in an automobile accident when Agee was six years old became the defining event of his life, the wound he would spend his career trying to articulate. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University, where he won a poetry prize, and joined the staff of Fortune magazine shortly after graduation. His assignment to document Alabama sharecroppers in 1936 with Walker Evans produced the work that would become his masterpiece. This author hub collects 2 works in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.