James Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. When he was six, his father was killed in a car accident, driving home at night after visiting his own sick father. That death was the central event of Agee’s life, and he spent his last years writing about it.

He was sent to a boarding school run by Episcopal monks in the mountains near Sewanee, Tennessee, where a teacher, Father James Harold Flye, became his lifelong friend and correspondent. He went on to Phillips Exeter and Harvard, published a book of poems at twenty-four, and went to work as a writer for Fortune, the business magazine.

In the summer of 1936, Fortune sent him and the photographer Walker Evans to Alabama to report on the lives of white tenant farmers in the Depression. They spent weeks living with three families in Hale County. The magazine never ran the piece. Instead, Agee spent years turning it into a book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), with Evans’s photographs at the front. It is unlike any other piece of journalism: long, anguished, hugely detailed, describing the families’ houses down to the nails and the cracks in the boards, and constantly questioning whether it is right to look at poor people’s lives this way at all. It sold only a few hundred copies. Two decades later, it was rediscovered and hailed as a masterpiece.

Agee also became one of the best film critics in America, writing for Time and The Nation, and then a screenwriter. He co-wrote The African Queen (1951) with John Huston and wrote the script for The Night of the Hunter (1955).

He drank too much, smoked heavily and worked through the night, and his heart gave out. He died in a New York taxi in May 1955, at forty-five. His unfinished novel about his father’s death, A Death in the Family, was assembled by his editors and published in 1957; it won the Pulitzer Prize. Its prologue, a prose poem called “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” about a small boy lying on a quilt in the backyard on a summer evening, listening to his family talk, had already been set to music for soprano and orchestra by Samuel Barber.