James Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1909 and graduated from Harvard University. He was one of the most influential American film critics of the 1940s, and he wrote screenplays including The African Queen.
He worked with the photographer Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). He died in New York in 1955 before finishing A Death in the Family, which was edited by David McDowell and published in 1957. It won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Source: Wikipedia