James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, ShorterFiction (Library of America)
James Agee was a writer of singular intensity and extraordinary gifts: compassionate, angry, provocative, and superbly inventive. This volume collects his two prose masterpieces along with other fiction. InLet Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee invented a new genre to convey his stark vision of the lives of Alabama tenant farmers; a 64-page photo insert reproduces Walker Evans's now iconic photographs from the expanded 1960 edition. InA Death in the Family, his great autobiographical novel presented here for the first time in a newly corrected text, he confronts in intimate emotional detail the impact of his father's death. To these works are added his novellaThe Morning Watchand three remarkable stories.