After losing his father at the age of six, James Agee moved with his mother to Knoxville, Tennesse, where he enrolled in an Episcopal boarding school. There he befriended one of his teachers, Pastor James Harold Flye, with whom he would maintain a long and intimate epistolar relationship from the age of fifteen until the day he was surprised by an untimely death. The letters gathered here offer a magnificent portrait of this great American writer, of his rich inner life and of his tumultuous life. They are a handbook of instructions and sacrifices for novelists, they are a social and political chronicle of thirty years of american history, they are a remarkable document of literary and film criticism, a compilation of dreams and ambitions of youth, the bitter recognition of a failure and a late reconciliation with art as a common enterprise, solidarity and essentially anonymous. And t...read more
