title: James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men / A Death in the Family / shorter fiction (LOA #159) (Library of America James Agee Edition)
author:  James Agee 
description: James Agee was a writer of singular intensity and extraordinary gifts: compassionate, angry, provocative, and superbly inventive. This volume collects his two prose masterpieces along with other fiction. In <i>Let Us Now Praise Famous Men</i>, Agee invented a new genre to convey his stark vision of the lives of Alabama tenant farmers; a 64-page photo insert reproduces Walker Evans's now iconic photographs from the expanded 1960 edition. In <i>A Death in the Family</i>, his great autobiographical novel presented here for the first time in a newly corrected text, he confronts in intimate emotional detail the impact of his father's death. To these works are added his novella <i>The Morning Watch</i> and three remarkable stories.
zlib_text: 
  
  
  James Agee was born in Tennessee in 1909 and graduated from Harvard
  University. His renowned study of Alabama sharecroppers during the Depression,
  _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,_ appeared in 1941. Agee was known for his movie
  reviews and screenplays, and published a volume of poetry and a novella, as
  well. He died in 1955, two years before his major work of fiction, _A Death in
  the Family,_ was published and won the Pulitzer Prize.
  
  
  
  
  
  _Chapter 1_
  
  
  AT SUPPER THAT NIGHT, as many times before, his father said, “Well, spose we
  go to the picture show.”
  
  
  “Oh, Jay!” his mother said. “That horrid little man!”
  
  
  “What’s wrong with him?” his father asked, not because he didn’t know what she
  would say, but so she would say it.
  
  
  “He’s so _nasty!”_ she said, as she always did. “So _vulgar!_ With his nasty
  little cane; hooking up skirts and things, and that nasty little walk!”
  
  
  His father laughed, as he always did, and Rufus felt that it had become rather
  an empty joke; but as always the la