Joel Agee (born 1940 in New York City) is an American writer and translator. He lives in New York. Early life Joel Agee is the son of the American author James Agee. After his parents divorced in 1941, he and his mother Alma Agee, née Mailman, went to live in Mexico where she met and married the expatriate German novelist Bodo Uhse. Agee's half-brother Stefan Uhse, born in Mexico in 1946, took his own life in 1973 in New York City. In 1948 the family moved to the Soviet sector of Berlin, where Uhse became editor in chief of the cultural magazine Aufbau, a member of the GDR-Volkskammer, and later chairman of the East German writers association. When her marriage failed in 1960, Alma Uhse relocated with her sons back to the United States. Joel Agee grew up in a literary family, and at an early age was determined to become a writer. Having various times dropped out of school, he was to a certain degree self-educated. He married Susan Lemansky in 1966 and their daughter Gina was born in 1967. A small inheritance enabled him to travel around Europe for two and a half years with his wife and daughter in search of kindred souls interested in founding a commune. During this period, the late sixties and early seventies, he was drawn to Buddhism and used drugs, notably LSD. Briefly, before returning to the US, he spent time in an English prison after being busted for possession. Many of these experiences are recounted in his memoir In the House of My Fear. Career Joel Agee began freelancing in the 1970s, and his essays began appearing in such prestigious magazines as The New Yorker. In 1980 he became a staff writer for Harper's Magazine and in the following year he was named fiction editor. He wrote the memoir Twelve Years – An American Boyhood in East Germany (1981), followed by In the House of My Fear (2004). He has translated works by Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Elias Canetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gottfried Benn, Hans Erich Nossack, Jürg Federspiel, Aeschylus and others. He has contributed essays, stories, travel pieces and book reviews to The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, and other national publications. In 2022 Melville House Books published Agee's first work of fiction, the novel The Stone World. Works Fiction The Stone World. Melville House