Letters of James Agee to Father Flye

Praise for Letters of James Agee to Father Flye

“Comparable in importance to Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up and Thomas Wolfe’s letters as a self portrait of the artist in the modern scene.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“A human document of searing honesty and naked beauty.”
—Atlanta Constitution

“The stuff of life . . . Extraordinary letters which in their revelation of the hidden springs of genius constitute a major work of art.” 
—Pittsburg Press

“Extraordinary letters . . . [James Agee] was what used to be called ‘an original’ . . . able to think in general terms without making a fool of himself, therein differing from most American creative writers of this century.”
—Dwight Macdonald 

“He simply preferred conversation to composition. The private game of translating life into language, or fitting words to things, did not sufficiently fascinate him. His eloquence naturally dispersed itself in spurts of interest and jets of opinion. In these letters, the extended, ‘serious’ projects he wishes he could get to . . . have about them the grandiose, gassy quality of talk.”
—John Updike, The New Republic

“From a reading of the letters Agee emerges as a warm human being with a deep commitment to life as a person and as a writer. It is a rewarding experience to make his acquaintance.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for James Agee and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

“A book of wonders—an untamable American classic in the same line as Leaves of Grass and Moby-Dick.” 
—David Denby, The New Yorker

“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is . . . a classic work, an exercise in pure, declarative humanism. It will read true forever.” 
—David Simon, creator of The Wire

“The most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.” 
—Lionel Trilling

“In my opinion, his column is the most remarkable event in American journalism . . . What he says is of such profound interest, expressed with such extraordinary wit and felicity, and so transcends its ostensible—to me, rather unimportant—subject, that his articles belong in that very select class—the music critiques of Berlioz and Shaw are the only other members I know—of newspaper work which has permanent literary value.” 
—W. H. Auden

“[James Agee’s] work continues to feel so vital just because it remains so nakedly vulnerable, so provisional, so utterly lacking in that subtle artistic poison of self-confident complacency . . . He honestly does seem something close to the James Dean of American literature.” 
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post