James Agee - Biography

Biography

James Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, at Highland Avenue and 15th Street (renamed James Agee Street in 1999) in what is now the Fort Sanders neighborhood to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler. When Agee was six, his father was killed in an automobile accident. From the age of seven, Agee and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in boarding schools. The most influential of these was located near his mother's summer cottage two miles from Sewanee, Tennessee. Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys was run by Episcopal monks affiliated with the Order of the Holy Cross. It was there that Agee's lifelong friendship with Episcopal priest Father James Harold Flye and his wife began in 1919. As Agee's close friend and spiritual confidant, Flye received many of Agee's most revealing letters.

Agee's mother married Father Erskind Wright in 1924, and the two moved to Rockland, Maine. Agee went to Knoxville High School for the 1924–1925 school year, then traveled with Father Flye to Europe in the summer, when Agee was sixteen. On their return, Agee transferred to a boarding school in New Hampshire, entering the class of 1928 at Phillips Exeter Academy. Soon after, he began a correspondence with Dwight Macdonald.

At Phillips Exeter, Agee was president of The Lantern Club and editor of the Monthly where his first short stories, plays, poetry and articles were published. Despite barely passing many of his high school courses, Agee was admitted to Harvard University's class of 1932. There Agee took classes taught by Robert Hillyer and I. A. Richards; his classmate in those was the future poet and critic Robert Fitzgerald, with whom he would eventually work at TIME. Agee was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Advocate and delivered the class ode at his commencement. Soon after graduation, he married Via Saunders on January 28, 1933; they divorced in 1938. Later that same year, he married Alma Mailman (they divorced in 1941).

In 1941 Alma moved to Mexico with their year-old son Joel, to live with Communist politician and writer Bodo Uhse. In 1946 son Stefan (Uhse) was born, who later took his own life in New York in 1973. The family moved to Berlin in 1948. The marriage lasted until 1960, when Alma Agee and her sons went back to the USA. In 1982 Joel Agee published a memoir of his youth among the communist elite of the German Democratic Republic called Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany. A second memoir of his life in the 1960s is In the House of My Fear (2004) and translated German writers Heinrich von Kleist (Penthesilea), Elias Canetti (aphorisms), a lot of Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Hans Erich Nossak (The End - Hamburg 1943 2006) and others.

James Agee began living in Greenwich Village with Mia Fritsch, whom he married in 1946. They had two daughters, Teresa and Andrea, and a son John. In 1951 in Santa Barbara, Agee, a hard drinker and chain-smoker, suffered the first of two heart attacks. Four years later, on May 16, 1955, Agee was in New York City when he suffered the fatal second heart attack. Agee, 45, died in a taxi cab en route to a doctor's appointment, two days before the anniversary of his father's death. He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, New York, property still held by Agee descendants.