Lucille Burroughs, daughter of a cotton sharecropper. At its worst, the language can make readers feel as if they’re under assault by the wolf in “The Three Little Pigs,” huffing and puffing until he blows the novel down. At its best, his prose is incantatory, a Latin Mass for the Latinless, summoning up through sound alone a host of meanings. Will Blythe wrote: “Of course, one of Agee’s virtues as a writer is his willingness to heat up the rhetoric until it boils. In 2005 the Library of America issued his complete works in two volumes. He also wrote, with photographer Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men on poverty in the rural Alabama of 1936 (“However that may be, this is a book about “sharecroppers,” and is written for all those who have a soft place in their hearts for the laughter and tears inherent in poverty viewed at a distance, and especially for those who can afford the retail price in the hope that the reader will be edified, and may feel kindly disposed toward any well-thought-out liberal efforts to rectify the unpleasant situation down South, and will somewhat better and more guiltily appreciate the next good meal he eats and in the hope, too, that he will recommend this little book to really sympathetic friends, in order that our publishers may at least cover their investment and that (just the merest perhaps) some kindly thought may be turned our way, and a little of your money fall to poor little us.’ Above all else: in God’s name don’t think of it as Art.”) He was also a screenwriter, a journalist, a film reviewer, and most of all, a drinker and a smoker: he died in a taxi at age 45 in New York City in 1955. You’ve got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they’ve come through it and that you will too.”) The book won him the Pulitzer. You’ve got to keep your mind off pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of a howl about it. He is the author of A Death in the Family, an autobiographical novel on the death of his father when Agee was 6 (“You’ve got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice. Today at the Editor’s glance: If your soul isn’t entirely soot from that shameless orgy of waste and consumer manipulation known as black Friday, marking James Agee’s anniversary–he was born on this day in 1909: the best thing Knoxville, Tenn.
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