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In the summer of 1936 Fortune magazine sent James Agee, a 26-year-old staff writer, and the photographer Walker Evans to Hale County, Alabama, to report on cotton tenant farmers. Fortune never ran the piece. Agee turned it into Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which sold about 600 copies. He spent the next decade writing about films for Time and The Nation and then writing them, including The African Queen. In May 1955 he died of a heart attack in a New York taxi, aged 45, leaving a novel about his father’s death unfinished; published in 1957, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. This guide covers his eight key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 key books · 1934–2013 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
James Agee published only three books in his lifetime; most of his work appeared after his death in 1955. His best-known books are A Death in the Family (1957), which won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), with photographs by Walker Evans. Start with A Death in the Family; Cotton Tenants (2013) prints the original 1936 magazine report behind Famous Men for the first time.
Where to Start with James Agee
If you want his novel
→ A Death in the Family (1957) — a family in Knoxville in 1915, in the days after the father is killed.
If you want the Depression reporting, in short form
→ Cotton Tenants (2013) — the 1936 report before it became a book of nearly 500 pages.
If you want the full experiment
→ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) — the book about three tenant families, with Walker Evans’s photographs.
If you want his film writing
→ Agee on Film (1958).
8 James Agee Books, in Order
Permit Me Voyage
His first book, a collection of poems chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets and published by Yale University Press with a foreword by Archibald MacLeish. It was the only book of poetry he published in his lifetime; he was 24 and already working for Fortune.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Agee and Walker Evans spent several weeks in the summer of 1936 with three sharecropping families in Hale County, Alabama; Agee lived in one family’s farmhouse. The book opens with Evans’s uncaptioned photographs, then gives several hundred pages of Agee’s prose, which records their houses, clothes and work in exhaustive detail and questions his own right to be there. The families appear under pseudonyms. It sold about 600 copies in 1941; the 1960 reissue, with 62 photographs, found a large audience.
The Morning Watch
A short novel set over a few hours of Good Friday morning in 1923. Richard, a 12-year-old pupil at an Episcopal boarding school in Tennessee, keeps the 4 a.m. watch of prayer in the chapel, then slips off with two other boys to swim in a forbidden lake. The school is based on St. Andrew’s near Sewanee, where Agee studied; he told John Huston that Richard was “roughly myself”.
A Death in the Family
Knoxville, 1915: Jay Follet is killed in a car accident driving home from his sick father’s bedside, and the novel follows his wife Mary, their children Rufus and Catherine and the wider family from the day before the crash to the funeral. Rufus is based on Agee, whose own father died in a car accident when he was six. Unfinished at his death, the book was prepared for publication by the editor David McDowell, who opened it with the prose poem “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”. It won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Agee on Film
His film reviews and essays, written anonymously for Time and under his own name for The Nation in the 1940s, collected after his death. A second volume, of five of his screenplays with a foreword by John Huston, followed in 1960.
Letters of James Agee to Father Flye
Some thirty years of letters to James Harold Flye, the Episcopal priest who taught him history at St. Andrew’s school in Tennessee when Agee was about ten. They run from his admission to Phillips Exeter Academy to his death, and the two remained close friends throughout.
Brooklyn Is
A long essay on Brooklyn that Agee wrote for Fortune in 1938–39 while living in Clinton Hill. The magazine rejected it, and it was forgotten until 1968. Fordham University Press published it as a book in 2005, with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem.
Cotton Tenants
The report Agee actually wrote for Fortune after the 1936 trip to Alabama, about 30,000 words long and long presumed lost until a typescript turned up among his papers in the 2000s. Unlike Famous Men, it uses the families’ real names, the Burroughs, Fields and Tingle families, and it reads as plainer magazine reporting. Published by Melville House and The Baffler with thirty Evans photographs and an introduction by Adam Haslett.
In What Order to Read James Agee
Agee’s books do not continue from one another, and publication order is misleading: five of the eight came out after his death, and A Death in the Family, the last thing he was writing, was published before letters and essays he had written decades earlier.
Two pairs are worth reading together. Cotton Tenants is the first version of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, so reading it first makes the longer book easier to follow. The Morning Watch and A Death in the Family both draw on his own Tennessee childhood, one at school, one at home.
A reading path
1. A Death in the Family (1957)
2. The Morning Watch (1951)
3. Cotton Tenants (2013)
4. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)
5. Agee on Film (1958)
Everything Else James Agee Published
Beyond the 8 key books: 8 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Posthumous collections and editions
6
6 books · 1960–2007
- 1960Agee on Film: Volume IIfive of his screenplays, with a foreword by John Huston
- 1968The Collected Poems of James Ageeedited by Robert Fitzgerald
- 1968The Collected Short Prose of James Ageeedited by Robert Fitzgerald
- 2005Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, & Shorter FictionLibrary of America
- 2005Film Writing and Selected JournalismLibrary of America, edited by Michael Sragow
- 2007A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author’s Textedited by Michael Lofaro
Screenplays
2
2 books · 1951–1955
- 1951The African Queenwith John Huston, from the novel by C. S. Forester
- 1955The Night of the Hunterfrom the novel by Davis Grubb
The years · 1909–1958
Quick facts about James Agee
- Known for
- James Agee is known for writing about poor Southern families and his own Knoxville childhood with the intensity of a poet, and for shaping American film criticism in the 1940s.
- 1909
- Born in Knoxville, Tennessee
- 1936
- Alabama with Walker Evans for Fortune
- 1951
- Co-writes The African Queen
- 1958
- A Death in the Family wins the Pulitzer
- Born
- 27 November 1909, Knoxville, Tennessee
- Died
- 16 May 1955, New York City, of a heart attack, aged 45
- Education
- Phillips Exeter Academy; Harvard College (1932)
- Worked
- Fortune (1932–1937); film critic for Time and The Nation in the 1940s
- Screenplays
- The African Queen (1951), Oscar-nominated with John Huston; The Night of the Hunter (1955)
- Honours
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1958, awarded after his death
The red mark is 1958: A Death in the Family wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, three years after his death.
How James Agee Writes: Every Detail as Evidence
Agee wrote prose like a poet who had trained as a reporter. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men he records the families’ houses, clothing and work in exhaustive detail, as if nothing about these lives were too small to set down. He also keeps interrupting himself to question what he is doing: the book repeatedly asks whether a well-paid writer from New York has any right to turn poor people into material.
His fiction turns the same attention on his own childhood. The Morning Watch stays inside a 12-year-old boy’s head for a few hours of one morning, and A Death in the Family moves between the adults and the children of one family, so that the reader often understands more than Rufus does. “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”, which opens the novel, is a single long remembered evening; Samuel Barber set it to music for soprano and orchestra.
The film criticism is plainer but just as exact. Writing weekly for Time and The Nation, he treated popular films as seriously as books. After leaving staff work in 1948 he wrote a well-received Life article on the silent film comedians, and then screenplays of his own. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men the same respect for the image shows: Evans’s photographs come first, without captions, so they do not merely illustrate the text.
Frequently asked questions about James Agee’s books
How many books has James Agee written?
He published three books in his lifetime: Permit Me Voyage (1934), Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and The Morning Watch (1951). Everything else appeared after his death in 1955. This page lists eight key books, plus later collections, editions and two screenplays.
What are James Agee’s books in order?
Permit Me Voyage (1934), Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), The Morning Watch (1951), A Death in the Family (1957), Agee on Film (1958), Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (1962), Brooklyn Is (2005) and Cotton Tenants (2013).
Where should I start with James Agee?
A Death in the Family, his only full-length novel: a Knoxville family in the days after the father is killed in a car accident. If you would rather start with his nonfiction, read Cotton Tenants before Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
What is James Agee’s most famous book?
A Death in the Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his 1941 book with Walker Evans about three tenant families in Alabama. The second sold about 600 copies on publication and only became widely read after its 1960 reissue.
Did James Agee win the Pulitzer Prize after he died?
Yes. He died on 16 May 1955 with A Death in the Family unfinished. The novel was published in 1957 and won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Is A Death in the Family based on a true story?
Largely. Agee’s father died in a car accident when Agee was six, and the boy Rufus Follet is based on Agee himself. The novel is set in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he grew up.
Which edition of A Death in the Family should I read?
The 1957 text is the one that won the Pulitzer, but it was assembled by the editor David McDowell, who added the “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” prologue and reorganised the chapters. In 2007 the scholar Michael Lofaro published A Restoration of the Author’s Text, based on Agee’s manuscripts, arguing that the 1957 version is not what Agee intended. Most readers still start with the 1957 text.
What is the difference between Cotton Tenants and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men?
Both come from the same 1936 Fortune assignment in Alabama. Cotton Tenants is the roughly 30,000-word magazine report Fortune never ran, published in 2013 and using the families’ real names. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) is the much longer and more personal book he made from the experience, with the families under pseudonyms.
Did James Agee write The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter?
He co-wrote The African Queen (1951) with John Huston, and the two were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. He wrote the screenplay for The Night of the Hunter (1955), although his part was long disputed, with some critics claiming Charles Laughton wrote the script; Agee’s 293-page first draft, found in 2004, contradicts reports that his screenplay was not used.
Has A Death in the Family been adapted?
Yes. Tad Mosel’s play All the Way Home (1960) won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; it was filmed in 1963 in Agee’s Knoxville neighbourhood and again for television in 1971. PBS made a television film of the novel in 2002.
Footnotes
- James Agee — Wikipedia
- A Death in the Family — Wikipedia
- James Agee, 1958 Fiction — The Pulitzer Prizes
- Walker Evans — Encyclopedia of Alabama
- Cotton Tenants: Three Families — The Baffler
- Lives Nurtured in Disadvantage — Los Angeles Review of Books
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.”
— James Agee, “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” (1938), the opening of A Death in the Family (1957)
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