James Agee brought to bear all his moral energy, slashing wit, and
boundless curiosity in the criticism and journalism that established him
as one of the commanding literary voices of America at mid-century. In
1944 W. H. Auden called Agee's film reviews for The Nation "the most
remarkable regular event in American journalism today." Those columns,
along with much of the movie criticism that Agee wrote for Time
through most of the 1940s, were collected posthumously in Agee on Film:
Reviews and Comments, undoubtedly the most influential writings on film
by an American. This Library of America volume supplements the classic
pieces from Agee on Film with previously uncollected writings on
Ingrid Bergman, the Marx Brothers, Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat,
Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine, and a wealth of other cinematic
subjects.
Whether reviewing a Judy Garland musical or a wartime documentary,
assessing the impact of Italian neorealism or railing against the
compromises in a Hollywood adaptation of Hemingway, Agee always wrote of
movies as a pervasive, profoundly significant part of modern life, a new
art whose classics (Chaplin, Dovzhenko, Vigo) he revered and whose
betrayal in the interests of commerce or propaganda he often deplored.
If his frequent disappointments could be registered in acid tones, his
enthusiasms were expressed with passionate eloquence.
Agee's own work as a screenwriter is represented by his script for
Charles Laughton's unique and haunting masterpiece of Southern gothic,
The Night of the Hunter, adapted from the novel by Davis Grubb. This
collection also includes examples of Agee's masterfully probing
reporting for Fortune--on subjects as diverse as the Tennessee Valley
Authority, commercial orchids, and cockfighting--and a sampling of his
literary reviews, among them appreciations of William Faulkner, Virginia
Woolf, S. J. Perelman, and William Carlos Williams.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization
founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by
publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most
significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than
300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in
length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are
printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
