James Agee

From Today In Literature:

On this day in 1909 James Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. Agee was a poet (Permit Me Voyage), an influential film critic (collected as Agee on Film), a social documentarist (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, based on his six weeks with Alabama sharecroppers), and a screenwriter (The African Queen), but he is best remembered for his autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family.

I was introduced to Agree in the Army when Dick loaned me his copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I was blown away. In fact, the book is nearby, in a stack of favorite books due for a periodic rereading. As a prose stylist, Agee had an extraordinary gift. There are passages in Famous Men as moving as anything I've read.

I made a special trip once when I was visiting my parents in Milford, New Jersey, to go to nearby Frenchtown so I could see the hotel where Agee stayed for a time while he was working on the Famous Men manuscript. I stood outside and gawked a while, which is as great a tribute as you can give a writer, taking a pilgrimage to where s/he once was, then gawking, not sure what you should do.

Letters to Father Flye is an exchange of letters between Agee and a priest-friend that documents the struggles Agee experienced in life. He was a tortured soul. A prodigious drinker. And he died young. What an old story in American letters.