to detail and desire to replicate real people or situations with unflawed accuracy, in both external attributes and internal implications, result in long sentences, complex constructions, expansive catalogs, meticulously qualified arguments, and use of some of the finer technical devices of logic and rhetoric. While brevity was not a central concern of Agee, however, his writing is not verbose or diffuse, for the full and often dense prose reflects the precision and breadth of Agee’s powers of observation and discernment.

Nowhere are these powers more evident than in his writings for and about film. On one hand, his love of the quickly developing medium infused his journalistic and novelistic endeavors with the power to evoke images and entire scenes with cinematic fullness. On the other hand, it led him to devote his intellect and labor to elevating film as an art form, and Agee’s reviews helped revolutionize attitudes toward film. He approached film with lucidity and treated it with as much respect and severe scrutiny as have been devoted to poetry and painting through the centuries. In writing about film, Agee found an eloquence that few others had—and that he himself often lacked elsewhere. Rather than simply report on a film’s entertainment value or intellectual content, Agee brought to his reviews an inside, craftsmanlike approach. Even before he had begun making films himself, he saw and reviewed them with an eye to the specific cinematographic techniques involved in creating the series of images. Thus his reviews are often as informative and provocative as the works on which they focus.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

First published: 1941

Type of work: Essay

The lives of tenant farmers in Alabama, and their relationship to two journalists who come to report on them, are complex, difficult, and inspiring.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a unique work of literature. It was first conceived as a feature article for Fortune magazine: In the summer of 1936, Agee was sent to Alabama along with photographer Walker Evans to document the lives of tenant farmers. The article they produced, however, was much too passionate and impressionistic for the editors of Fortune, so Agee worked on the project privately and eventually published the “article” as a four-hundred-page book. When it first appeared, only two years after John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, with which it shares certain similarities, the book received bad reviews and sold a mere six hundred copies. It was only after Agee’s death, and especially in the political turbulence and social awareness of the 1960’s, that the book achieved popularity and literary standing.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is as much about Agee’s personal experiences among three poor sharecropping families as it is about their lives per se. For Agee, the two could not be considered separately, and the moral and emotional implications of his and Evans’s presence among their subjects—seeing themselves as spies—are central to any meaningful contemplation of tenant farming during the Depression. Thus, the piece moves back and forth, sometimes overtly in large sections, sometimes momentarily in parentheses, between precisely objective reportage and relentless self-examination.

The structure of the book reflects the care that Agee obviously invested in it. The composition is divided into various sections, and movements at times seem nearly spontaneous or improvised. Agee uses a series of prefatory pieces to create a sense of false beginnings that nullifies any expectations the reader may have and establishes the book’s painstaking pace. Then, sections are introduced with titles, labels, and enumerations that reflect no overall pattern but rather mirror the complexity of the material they cover. They are not placed in chronological order, order of composition, or any order sequence of logical development. Each new section may be a new beginning, marked by an epigram, a poem, a list, or a dramatic shift in tone. Transitions are often sudden and connections unclear. Such an unorthodox structure, far from being a gratuitous game devised to baffle, derives from the earnest effort to make sense of the experience of observing, interacting with, and living among sharecroppers.

In spite of this complexity, Agee is rigorously direct with the reader as to his purposes in the book and his awareness of the limitations its form places on him. He asks for no suspension of disbelief—the book is admittedly only paper—and makes no claims to extraordinary powers of insight or expression. He simply trusts in words. This trust and the earnest effort to be truthful, like so many attributes of the work, are relentless, and therein lies their emotional and philosophical power.

Within this context of moral and literary anxiety, Agee documents, with the help of Evans’s photographs (which precede and are to be considered coequal with sections of the text), the poverty, aspirations, and pathos of the people he encounters. The Gudger, Ricketts, and Woods families live in poverty: Agee exhaustively details their surroundings, their clothing, their daily activities, their conversations, their work, their educations, their diets, their health, and any other aspect of their lives he can attempt to portray. He also depicts his own interactions with them and the relationships that result. He contemplates the social and political implications of their lives for society as a whole and, through the intense and relentless examination of their existence, poses practical and philosophical questions of universal relevance.

A Death in the Family

First published: 1957

Type of work: Novel

A man’s sudden death in an automobile crash leaves his wife and small children to try to continue without him.

A Death in the Family is a novel of delightful and deceptive simplicity. As the title implies, it is the story of a man’s death and its effects on the family he leaves behind. Jay Follet is happily married to his devout wife, Mary, and they have two children, Rufus and Catherine, ages six and four. Early one morning, Jay is summoned by his drunken brother Ralph to drive from Knoxville to their father’s deathbed in rural LaFollette. As Jay suspects, the journey turns out to be unnecessary—Ralph exaggerated the severity of the old man’s condition—so he sets out to return home, hoping to arrive before the children go to bed. Formerly an alcoholic, Jay may have had something to drink; apparently, high speeds and a loose pin in the steering mechanism cause his car to go off the road. Jay, with only two tiny bruises on his face, experiences a fatal concussion. His family is first alerted that he was in an accident, and then that he died. His body is returned to Knoxville, and the funeral is held. That, with several interpolated flashbacks (sections in italics which the editors, after Agee’s death, placed where they thought best) is the entire action of the novel.

Within this bare plot, Agee uses careful and subtle detail to create character and emotional movement. The narrative voice is nearly absent; it either describes the external attributes of a particular moment or records the impressions and inner thoughts of any of a number of characters. From chapter to chapter, the point of view often shifts among Mary, Rufus, Catherine, Ralph, Mary’s brother Andrew, and her Aunt Hannah. Each character brings to the narrative a particular sensibility through which events are viewed, and Agee often provides parallel, simultaneous perspectives on a given scene or moment. Contrasting with Mary’s emotional spirituality are Hannah’s even-headed wisdom and Andrew’s often bitter skepticism. Moreover, against the seeming clarity of the adults, Agee offers the perceptions of the children, who attempt to understand their elders, their own roles in the world, and their father’s disappearance with a balanced mixture of innocence, selfishness, and confusion.

Within the larger story of Jay’s death and burial, most of which is recounted directly but from the distance of the Follet home, smaller events establish the novel’s dramatic life and texture. Agee provides a wealth of otherwise ordinary incidents or encounters—Jay and Rufus seeing a Chaplin film, Jay’s early morning departure, Hannah buying Rufus a hat, Rufus and Catherine bickering, Mary being comforted by the priest from Chattanooga—that take on special power or significance on this particular day in the life of the family. Agee portrays moments vividly but without pretension or fanfare; the moments both stand alone and accumulate to create a textured portrait of a group of people and a meaningful event in their lives.

A Death in the Family is a deeply autobiographical novel. Not only does Jay Follet’s death mirror that of Agee’s father, but other details—the name Rufus and the taunting it occasions, the mother’s extreme religiosity, and the priest’s refusal to administer full rites—are also drawn directly from the author’s past as well. No effort is made to fictionalize the story; rather, Agee has given imaginative, artistic, and unsentimental expression to his vivid memories of a crucial period in his life.