Portraits of 20th Century American Writers: James Agee

James Agee by George H. Rothacker - acrylic on canvas - 24" x 24" - Original painting $2400, prints @$90 each plus tax and shipping (Prints are an edition of 50, signed, titled and numbered with an image area of 13"x 13").

I became acquainted with James Agee in my early 20s when I picked up a paperback of his unfinished classic, A Death in the Family. It was published in 1957, two years after his death, and had taken him 7 years to write it. According to a Goodreads review, “A Death in the Family remains a near-perfect work of art, an autobiographical novel that contains one of the most evocative depictions of loss and grief ever written.”

A Death in a Family received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958 and was a National Book Award Finalist the same year,.

James Agee had many demons, but his work is some of the most sensitive ever written. In collaboration with photographer Walker Evans, Agee spent 8 weeks in 1936 documenting the lives of sharecroppers in the dust bowl in 1936. The work was originally intended to be part of a trilogy that Agee intended as “an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity”.

In addition to a few books, Agee also wrote screen plays including exceptional ones for The African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Kathrine Hepburn, and Night of the Hunter, a scary film noir classic starring Robert Mitchum.