Agee, James Rufus (27 November 1909–16 May 1955), writer, was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of Hugh James Agee, a construction company employee, and Laura Whitman Tyler. The father’s family were poorly educated mountain farmers, while the mother’s were solidly middle class. Agee was profoundly affected by his father’s death in a car accident in 1916. He idealized his absent father and struggled against his mother and her genteel and (he felt) cold values. “Agee’s mother wanted him to be clean, chaste, and sober,” the photographer ...
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Agee, James Rufus (1909-1955), writer
William Stott
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Agee, James Rufus (1909-1955)
In
James Agee Photograph by Walker Evans, 1937. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-103100).
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Kael, Pauline (19 June 1919–3 Sept. 2001), film critic
Wayne Stengel
Kael, Pauline (19 June 1919–3 Sept. 2001), film critic, was the last of five children born to a chicken farmer of Russian Jewish extraction, Isaac Kael, and his wife, the former Judith Friedman, in Petaluma, California. When her family lost the farm when she was eight, they moved to San Francisco. She graduated from San Francisco Girls’ High School in ...
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Macdonald, Dwight (1906-1982), critic and editor
Stephen J. Whitfield
Macdonald, Dwight (24 March 1906–19 December 1982), critic and editor, was born in New York City, the son of Dwight Macdonald, an attorney, and Alice Hedges, the daughter of a successful Brooklyn merchant. Though his family was primarily middle class, Macdonald attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University, from which he graduated in 1928 with a B.A. degree. The circumstances of Macdonald’s family were reduced in 1926 when his father died, but the new monthly magazine ...
