James Agee

Agee's own father died in a car accident when he was six, a loss he circled for the rest of his life and finally confronted directly in his last, unfinished novel. He studied at Harvard, then spent the 1930s and 40s writing for Fortune and Time while drinking and working himself toward an early death.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his radical 1941 documentary collaboration with photographer Walker Evans on Alabama tenant farmers, sold almost nothing on publication and is now considered a landmark of American nonfiction. He also wrote film criticism and the screenplay for The African Queen.

He died of a heart attack in a New York taxi in 1955, at forty-five, leaving A Death in the Family unfinished; his editor assembled it from drafts, and it won the Pulitzer Prize the following year.