The Tragic Life of James Agee

A few years ago, a lawyer friend of mine from the Blackbelt gave me as a gift a book entitled The Collected Poems of James Agee.  Since I had never heard of Agee, in my ignorance I assumed that he was probably a local writer whose poetry anthology was the summation of his writings en toto.  I couldn't have been more wrong. Embarrasingly and because of this fact, I gave the anthology only casual glances-- reading a poem or two here and there-- while mostly letting it rest on my bookshelves for four years. 
Recently, the writings of this man and his life have crept back up into the forefront of my interest, and quite ironically, it aptly coincides with my intensifying intrigue into Alabama's Blackbelt.  About a week ago, I went to the Mountain Brook library to check out several books about the Blackbelt, and as I was perusing through several titles, I ran across a book called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  I had never heard of this title, and I wondered why it had anything to do with the state of Alabama, much less the Blackbelt.  I noticed that it had been written by James Agee.  "Who is this guy-- James Agee?" I thought to myself.  I quickly ran home to see if the names matched.  They did. 
John Hersey's introduction to the Let Us Now Praise Famous Men gives a short account of the life and writings of Agee.  Apparently, Hersey met Agee at a party for Time magazine writers in the fall of 1939.  Hersey writes, "He was at the heart of a constellation on the other side of the room, and he seemed to be doing all the talking.  There were rockets of laughter going up.  Someone told me the man was Jim Agee...No one else got many words in.  He talked with both his tongue and his hands. It seemed that for this person words had not only sound and meaning but also physical weight, volume, and shape, and to these qualities he tried, as he spoke, to give their full value with his long fingers and strong palms-- molding the clay of abstractions, arranging mental flowers, tightening difficult screws, caressing lusted-after erogenous zones, touching ideal chords on a ghost piano, and even, in moments of awe or vehemence, stretching his arms out and tilting the axis of the whole world." 
When I read Hersey's description of this enigmatic character, I was hooked.  I set out on my own little investigative journey into Agee's life.  As I became a pupil in AGEE 101, I firstly noticed how dichotomous his life truly was.  As a writer, Agee struggled tremendously with breaking free from the bonds that restrict artists in general, gaining freedom in our craft, i.e. "how to become what I wish I could when I can't."  Agee also struggled to find intimate, lasting relationships, having three wives by age forty-five.  He drank incessantly, smoked incessantly, warred with depression and inveterate thoughts of suicide.  Yet, Agee had a profound appreciation for the greatness and the limitless possibilities of humankind as bestowed upon us by our Creator.  His faith in Christ was a reverant one, certainly, but it almost seemed as though unendingly obstructed by Agee's own wrestlings with self-loathing and self-deprication. 
Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1909.  The most tragic event of his life occurred when he was but six years old, when his father was killed in an automobile accident.  Agee was sent to a school for boys, St. Andrews, in nearby Sewanee, Tennessee, where he was mentored by one Father Flye, a priest who became somewhat of a father to Agee in the absence of his own father.  For the rest of Agee's life, he remained in correspondence with Father Flye, giving accounts of his life and his failings in often anguished tones.
Agee enrolled at Harvard and became president of the Harvard Advocate, a highly-esteemed literary magazine.  After graduation, he was fortunate, through a friend, to land a job at Fortune magazine in New York, working and writing on the fifty-second floor of the Chrysler building.  Agee struggled with deadlines and brevity, alcohol, and women.  He listened to classical music, specifically Beethoven's Ninth, with the sound turned up as loud as possible, immersing himself with every piercing decibel. 
Finally, in 1936, Agee got the break he needed.  He was assigned to a piece on Southern sharecroppers with photographer Walker Evans.  An ecstatic Agee and the talented Evans went to Greenville, Alabama to find suitable subjects.  There, they were fortunate enough to find several families of tenant farmers to take them in for several weeks to conduct interviews and take pictures of their impoverished way of life.  What started out as a story for a magazine turned into one of the most compelling stories ever written about the people of Alabama. 
Tragically, Agee died in a New York taxicab of a heart attack--a product of years of bodily abuse of alcohol and hard living--before he even saw modest success of any of his works.  Posthumously, Agee won the Pulitzer Prize for his autobiography A Death in the Family, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has been critically acclaimed as one of the best works of the twentieth century.