James Rufus Agee (/ˈeɪdʒiː/ AY-jee; November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize.

Early life and education

Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, at Highland Avenue and 15th Street, which was renamed James Agee Street in 1999, in what is now the Fort Sanders neighborhood to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler. When Agee was six, his father was killed in an automobile accident. From the age of seven, Agee and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in several boarding schools. The most prominent of these was located near his mother's summer cottage two miles from Sewanee, Tennessee. Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys was run by the monastic Order of the Holy Cross affiliated with the Episcopal Church. It was there that Agee's lifelong friendship with Episcopal priest Father James Harold Flye, a history teacher at St. Andrew's, and his wife Grace Eleanor Houghton began in 1919. As Agee's close friend and mentor, Flye corresponded with him on literary and other topics through life and became a confidant of Agee's soul-wrestling. He published the letters after Agee's death. The New York Times Book Review pronounced The Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (1962 ) as "comparable in importance to Fitzgerald's 'The Crackup' and Thomas Wolfe's letters as a self-portrait of the artist in the modern American scene."