Focus Features

James Agee, the brilliant film critic, poet and screenwriter, lived life as if he was never going to die. Not fearlessly, but rather recklessly. He lived life on his terms and, in the years leading up to his death on May 16, 1955, his body had shown the signs that he needed to slow down. Agee was a chainsmoker and an alcoholic who had let his teeth rot and who, despite only being in his early forties, suffered a number of heart attacks because of his lifestyle choices. The end came for him in the back of a taxi in New York City, where he had a final, fatal heart attack. He was buried on a farm he owned in Hillsdale, New York. He died unquestionably without having fulfilled his potential, and the years following his death provided an all too poignant reminder of this. Two months after his death, Charles Laughton’s classic Night of the Hunter, with a screenplay by Agee, was released in theaters. In 1957, Agee’s novel A Death in the Family was posthumously published, winning the Pulitzer Prize the following year. In 1958 and 1960, volumes one and two of Agee on Film were published, putting his huge contribution to movie criticism into sharp focus. And his book with photographer Walker Evans about Southern sharecropper families, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, went from an ignored publication to an essential 20th century text. He was ultimately a man full of ideas. In his apartment at the time of his death was an unmailed letter in which he wrote, among other things, about a movie about elephants that he wanted to write. The letter finished, “Almost nobody I’ve described it to likes this idea, except me. It has its weakness, but I like it. I hope you do.”