# James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism (Loa #160): Agee on Film / Uncollected Film Writing / The Night of the Hunter / Journalism and Film R - Hardcover

by **James Agee** (Author), **Michael Sragow** (Editor)

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.

### Author Biography

**James Agee** (1909-1955) was a novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic, the author of such landmark works as _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_ and _Agee on Film_. His posthumously published novel _A Death in the Family_ (1957) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

**Michael Sragow** is the West Coast Editor and a film critic for _Film Comment_ and author of _Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master_.

**Number of Pages:** 748

**Dimensions:** 1.01 x 8.14 x 5.2 IN

**Illustrated:** Yes

**Publication Date:** September 22, 2005

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- James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism (Loa #160): Agee on Film / Uncollected Film Writing / The Night of the Hunter / Journalism and Film R - Hardcover

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