Most widely noted for his acclaimed Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family, Tennessee native James Agee was also a journalist, film critic, poet, and screenwriter. More than fifty years after Agee's untimely death, his canon of work continues to grow in popularity, and his ability to capture the human condition in all its forms remains unparalleled. Agee Agonistes is a compilation of seventeen essays from the James Agee Celebration hosted by the University of Tennessee in April 2005. The collection includes some of the best interpretations of Agee's work and explores the influences on his art, delineates the connections and syntheses he makes within his texts, and examines his involvement in music, ethics, surrealism, local and national history, cinema, television, poetry, literature, sociology, and journalism. The volume features never-before-seen pictures of Agee, previously unknown correspondence, and a remembrance by his oldest daughter, Deedee. The volume also includes the most extensive bibliography of secondary sources on Agee assembled to date. The essays are divided into four parts: Agee's Influences and Syntheses-Contributors: Paul Sprecher, William Bruce Wheeler, Jack Neely, Jeffrey J. Folks, Hugh Davis, Paul Ashdown Agee's Films-Contributors: Daniel Feller, Jeffrey Couchman, Mary E. Papke, John Wranovics Agee's Literature-Contributors: Fred Chappell, Angie Maxwell, John H. Summers, James A. Crank, Michael A. Lofaro Agee's Correspondence-Contributor: Brian Gempp. In addition, the volume includes an introductory essay entitled "Mapping Agee's Myriad Mind" by noted author David Madden. Agee Agonistes will be of interest to all those who study twentieth-century America and will introduce a new generation of readers to James Agee. Michael Lofaro is professor of American literature and American and Cultural Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has authored and edited numerous volumes and is coeditor, with Hugh Davis, of James Agee Rediscovered: The Journals of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Other New Manuscripts. He is also the general editor for the ten-volume series, The Works of James Agee, and the editor of its forthcoming first volume, A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text.

Drawn mainly from the centennial anniversary symposium on James Agee held at the University of Tennessee in the fall of 2009, the essays of Agee at 100 are as diverse in topic and purpose as is Agee’s work itself. Often devalued during his life by those who thought his breadth a hindrance to greatness, Agee’s achievements as a poet, novelist, journalist, essayist, critic, documentarian, and screenwriter are now more fully recognized. With its use of previously unknown and recently recovered materials as well as established works, this groundbreaking new collection is a timely contribution to the resurgence of interest in Agee’s significance. The essays in this collection range from the scholarly to the personal, and all offer insight into Agee’s writing, his cultural influence, and ultimately Agee himself. Dwight Garner opens with his reflective essay on “Why Agee Matters.” Several essays present almost entirely new material on Agee. Paul Ashdown writes on Agee’s book reviews, which, unlike Agee’s film criticism, have received scant attention. With evidence from two largely unstudied manuscripts, Jeffrey Couchman sets the record straight on Agee’s contribution to the screenplay for The African Queen and delves as well into his television “miniseries” screenplay Mr. Lincoln. John Wranovics treats Agee’s lesser-known films--the documentaries In the Street and The Quiet One and the Filipino epic Genghis Khan. Jeffrey J. Folks wrestles with Agee’s “culture of repudiation” while James A. Crank investigates his perplexing treatment of race in his prose. Jesse Graves and Andrew Crooke provide new analyses of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Michael A. Lofaro and Philip Stogdon both discuss Lofaro’s recently restored text of A Death in the Family. David Madden closes the collection with his short story “Seeing Agee in Lincoln,” an imagined letter from Agee to his longtime confidante Father Flye. The contributors to Agee at 100 utilize materials new and old to reveal the true importance of Agee's range of cultural sensibility and literary ability. Film scholars will also find this collection particularly engrossing, as will anyone fascinated by the work of the author rightly deemed the “sovereign prince of the English language.” Michael A. Lofaro is Lindsay Young Professor of American Literature and American and Cultural Studies at the University of Tennessee. Most recently, he restored James Agee’s A Death in the Family and is the general editor of the projected eleven-volume The Works of James Agee.

"This collection of new essays exploring the life and cultural significance of James Agee grew largely from the scholarship of The Works of James Agee series under the editorial guidance of Michael A. Lofaro. The present volume's eleven essays concern Agee's relation to authors as diverse as Wright Morris, John Dos Passos, William T. Vollmann, Stephen Crane, and Ernest Hemingway. Furthermore, it sheds fresh light on Agee's career as an artist, critic, romantic and modernist, reviewer of books, film, and photography, journalist for Fortune magazine, and, uniquely, explores the author's personal writings through the lens of his father's life"--

In Film and Literary Modernism, the connections between film, modernist literature, and the arts are explored by an international group of scholars. The impact of cinema upon our ways of seeing the world is highlighted in essays on city symphony films, avant-garde cinema, European filmmaking and key directors and personalities from Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein and Alain Renais to Alfred Hitchcock and Mae West. Contributors investigate the impact of film upon T. S. Eliot, time and stream of consciousness in Virginia Woolf and Henri Bergson, the racial undercurrents in the film adaptations of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction, and examine the film writing of William Faulkner, James Agee, and Graham Greene. Robert McParland assembles an international group of researchers including independent film makers, critics and professors of film, creative writers, teachers of architecture and design, and young doctoral scholars, who offer a multi-faceted look at modernism and the art of the film.

Wild Bill’s ever-evolving legend When it came to the Wild West, the nineteenth-century press rarely let truth get in the way of a good story. James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok’s story was no exception. Mythologized and sensationalized, Hickok was turned into the deadliest gunfighter of all, a so-called moral killer, a national phenomenon even while he was alive. Rather than attempt to tease truth from fiction, coauthors Paul Ashdown and Edward Caudill investigate the ways in which Hickok embodied the culture of glamorized violence Americans embraced after the Civil War and examine the process of how his story emerged, evolved, and turned into a viral multimedia sensation full of the excitement, danger, and romance of the West. Journalists, the coauthors demonstrate, invented “Wild Bill” Hickok, glorifying him as a civilizer. They inflated his body count and constructed his legend in the midst of an emerging celebrity culture that grew up around penny newspapers. His death by treachery, at a relatively young age, made the story tragic, and dime-store novelists took over where the press left off. Reimagined as entertainment, Hickok’s legend continued to enthrall Americans in literature, on radio, on television, and in the movies, and it still draws tourists to notorious Deadwood, South Dakota. American culture often embraces myths that later become accepted as popular history. By investigating the allure and power of Hickok’s myth, Ashdown and Caudill explain how American journalism and popular culture have shaped the way Civil War–era figures are remembered and reveal how Americans have embraced violence as entertainment.

C. Wright Mills was a radical public intellectual, a tough-talking, motorcycle-riding anarchist from Texas who taught sociology at Columbia University. Mills's three most influential books--The Power Elite, White Collar, and The Sociological Imagination--were originally published by OUP and are considered classics. The first collection of his writings to be published since 1963, The Politics of Truth contains 23 out-of-print and hard-to-find writings which show his growth from academic sociologist to an intellectual maestro in command of a mature style, a dissenter who sought to inspire the public to oppose the drift toward permanent war. Given the political deceptions of recent years, Mills's truth-telling is more relevant than ever. Seminal papers including "Letter to the New Left" appear alongside lesser known meditations such as "Are We Losing Our Sense of Belonging?" John Summers provides fresh insights in his introduction, which gives an overview of Mills's life and career. Summers has also written annotations that establish each piece's context and has drawn up a comprehensive bibliography of Mills's published and unpublished writings.

Reaching simultaneously into the realms of film and literature, "The Night of the Hunter": A Biography of a Film details the transformation of Davis Grubb's 1953 novel into a motion picture. A popular and critical success, the novel spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list, and Hollywood responded to its atmospheric lyricism. In the hands of first-time director Charles Laughton, the story became equal parts thriller, allegory, and fever dream, filled with slow, inexorable suspense. Yet the film initially failed at the box office. In the first major study of the long-lost first-draft screenplay by James Agee, Jeffrey Couchman confronts a fifty-year controversy about the authorship of the film. He explores many levels of artistic convergence-between novelist and director, director and actor, and cinematic form and audience expectations. The talents that clashed or came together along the road from book to movie created a film of rich stylistic contradiction. Combining biographical and historical analysis with a critical study of both the novel and the film, Couchman makes the case that this initially overlooked cinematic gem is a prismatic work that continually reveals new aspects of itself. Book jacket.