James Agee

James Agee, Pulitzer Prize winning author, was born in Knoxville in 1909. The intense writer was to enjoy little real success in his lifetime, but after death won accolades.

Once lived at 172 Bleecker Street (between MacDougal & Avenue of the Americas) in Manhattan's Greenwich Village district during the 1940s and 1950s.

He was also a film critic, and wrote for several magazines, including "Time". He sometimes reviewed the same film for more than one of those magazines, writing a completely new review each time rather than simply re-publishing the same one. His evolving opinions on these films can be gathered from these reviews. Among his most famous are the several he wrote for Laurence Olivier's film version of Henry V (1944) before and after the British film opened in the U.S. in 1946, and the several he wrote championing Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which was then receiving a very hostile reaction from audiences, who had no desire to see Chaplin playing a wife-murderer.

Once hung calmly out a 52nd-story window in New York City's Chrysler Building.

He never lived to see "The Night Of The Hunter" (1955), the film of perhaps his best screenplay. He died in the back of a New York taxi some four months before its opening. After his death, the director of the film, Charles Laughton, sent his widow a telegram simply saying, "I loved him".

In 1958 he won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his uncompleted biographical novel A Death in the Family. Agee also wrote the classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men with Walker Evans and the Oscar nominated screenplay for The African Queen with John Huston. Agee also appeared in a film and several TV shows while working in Hollywood.