It hasn't been too often, especially in recent years, that my lifelong interest (and graduate school training) in the cinema has aligned with my day job. Happily for me, I just finished copyediting a couple of projects that broke the long dry spell.
The two books in question are the latest additions to the University of Tennessee Press series The Works of James Agee. One of Knoxville's most famous sons, Agee (1909–1955) was an acclaimed poet, novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and film critic. A distinguished contemporary, Mary McCarthy, is said to have labeled him "a genius—our only genius." Whew. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but there is no denying that Agee, in his very short lifetime, left a distinctive mark on American letters and film culture.
Forthcoming in the summer of 2016 is The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter: First and Final Screenplays, compiled and edited (superlatively) by Dr. Jeffrey Couchman, an adjunct professor at the College of Staten Island and author of The Night of the Hunter: A Biography of a Film (Northwestern University Press, 2009), itself an excellent book, by the way.
For details, click here to see the Spring/Summer 2016 UT Press catalog and scroll down to page 14 for a description of the book. It happens that I wrote that description in addition to copyediting the volume, and I hope my enthusiasm for the book comes through. The "hype" is quite sincere, believe me. This is a project I'm very proud to have been a small part of.
Scheduled for the fall 2016 season is a volume of Agee's complete film criticism, including the entirety of his work for Time and The Nation, pieces for a few other publications, and some previously unpublished manuscripts. That one is edited by Professor Charles Maland of the University of Tennessee. I'll have more to say about it when the time comes.
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