Knox County Library

For Immediate Release: November 18, 2009
Contact: Mary Pom Claiborne 865-215-8767 or 865-640-4146

James Agee Lecture at the Library this Sunday

Join us for the final lecture of the James Agee Centennial Festival

Knox County Public Library is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of James Agee by teaming up with the University of Tennessee to present the final lecture in the James Agee Centennial Festival Sunday, November 22, 2 p.m. at Lawson McGhee Library, 500 W. Church Ave. Paul Ashdown will speak on "Agee's Apocrypha: The Lost Writings on Love and Letters."

About the Lecture:
As he was completing the writing of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in the fall of 1939, James Agee began writing book reviews for Time.  By October 1941 Agee had begun reviewing films as well as books for Time and the next year his signed film columns began appearing in The Nation. Agee on Film is a core text in the Agee canon but an "Agee on Books" has not been published.   Such a volume would include the 50 book reviews he wrote for Time, and more than a dozen reviews he wrote between 1927 and 1937 for the Phillips Exeter Monthly,
the Harvard Advocate, and the New Masses. Absent a published collection, this body of work has all but vanished in Agee scholarship.  When he was free to evaluate a book in a more personal literary journalism style, he could do the kind of writing that later made him famous as a film critic. Agee's reviews for the New Masses give insight into his thought process as he was conceiving Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  The Time reviews are transitional: not quite
literary journalism but journalism about literature, a cooling off period from the perimentation of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and a bridge to the literary journalism style he developed for the film reviews and the Special Projects articles he wrote for Time.  The circumstances under which he worked at Time further refined his understanding of the representation of reality in a mass media context.

About the Speaker:
Paul Ashdown has been a professor of journalism and electronic media at UT for 33 years. He's been a fan of James Agee since he saw the Mr. Lincoln series on television at the age of 8. He has edited and updated a collection of Agee's journalism and has written many essays about his work. His most recent published essay concerns Agee's connections with the Civil War.

The James Agee Centennial Festival is sponsored by The John C. Hodges Better English Fund, Department of English, University of Tennessee; The Haines-Morris Endowment that resides in the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Tennessee; College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tennessee; Knox County Public Library; and The James Agee Trust.

See the complete schedule of events, view rare historic pictures of the Agee
family, and learn more about the speakers and films at www.knoxlib.org/agee100.