Top Five James Agee Books
(in order of preference)
A Death in the Family (probably my single favorite Southern novel; it was Donald Harington’s, too)
Letters of James Agee to Father Flye
Agee on Film
The Morning Watch
The Collected Short Prose of James Agee
(Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee’s account of the lives of three families of tenant farmers during the Dust Bowl, featuring photographs by Walker Evans, is often regarded as a masterpiece—in a 2009 poll conducted by the Oxford American, it was named the best work of Southern nonfiction ever published—but by my lights it is only intermittently successful. Maybe I need to read it again.)