James Agee

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After graduation, Agee was hired by Time Inc. as a reporter, and moved to New York City, where he wrote for Fortune magazine from 1932 to 1937, although he is better known for his later film criticism in Time and The Nation. In 1934, he published his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage, with a foreword by Archibald MacLeish.

In the summer of 1936, during the Great Depression, Agee spent eight weeks on assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans, living among sharecroppers in Alabama. While Fortune did not publish his article, Agee turned the material into a book titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). It sold only 600 copies before being remaindered. Another manuscript from the same assignment discovered in 2003, titled Cotton Tenants, is believed to be the essay submitted to Fortune editors. The 30,000 word text, accompanied by photographs by Walker Evans, was published as a book in June 2013. John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in the Summer 2013 issue of BookForum that, "This is not merely an early, partial draft of Famous Men, in other words, not just a different book; it's a different Agee, an unknown Agee. Its excellence should enhance his reputation." A significant difference between the works is the use of original names in Cotton Tenants; Agee assigned fictional names to the subjects of Famous Men in order to protect their identity.

Agee left Fortune in 1937 while working on a book, then, in 1939, he took a book reviewing job at Time, sometimes reviewing up to six books per week; together, he and his friend Whittaker Chambers ran "the back of the book" for Time. In 1941, he became Time's film critic. From 1942–1948, he worked as a film critic for The Nation. Agee was an ardent champion of Charlie Chaplin's then unpopular film Monsieur Verdoux (1947), since recognized as a film classic. He was also a great admirer of Laurence Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet, especially Henry V. Agee on Film (1958) collected his writings of this period. Three writers listed it as one of the best film-related books ever written in a 2010 poll by the British Film Institute.

In 1948, Agee quit his job to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for Life Magazine about the silent movie comedians Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon. The article has been credited for reviving Keaton's career. As a freelancer in the 1950s, Agee continued to write magazine articles while working on movie scripts; he developed a friendship with photographer Helen Levitt.

In 1947 and 1948, Agee wrote an untitled screenplay for Charlie Chaplin, in which the Tramp survives a nuclear holocaust; posthumously titled The Tramp's New World, the text was published in 2005. The commentary Agee wrote for the 1948 documentary The Quiet One was his first contribution to a film that was completed and released.

Agee's career as a movie scriptwriter was curtailed by his alcoholism. Nevertheless, he is one of the credited screenwriters on two of the most respected films of the 1950s: The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955).

His contribution to Hunter is shrouded in controversy. Some critics have claimed that the published script was written by the film's director, Charles Laughton. Reports that Agee's screenplay for Hunter was not used have been proved false by the 2004 discovery of his first draft, which although 293 pages in length, contains many scenes included in the film that Laughton directed. However, Laughton seemed to have edited great parts of the script because Agee's original script was too long. While not yet published, the first draft has been read by scholars, most notably Professor Jeffrey Couchman of Columbia University. He credited Agee in the essay, "Credit Where Credit Is Due." Also false were reports that Agee was fired from the film. Laughton renewed Agee's contract and directed him to cut the script in half, which Agee did. Later, apparently at Robert Mitchum's request, Agee visited the set to settle a dispute between the star and Laughton. Letters and documents located in the archive of Agee's agent Paul Kohner bear this out; they were documented by Laughton's biographer Simon Callow, whose BFI book about The Night of the Hunter set this part of the record straight. Jeffrey Couchman, the author of a 2009 book about The Night of the Hunter, writes that Agee's screenplay would have been a film about six hours long, so Laughton had to cut and edit a considerable part of it.

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