Agee Redux, Part 3

Now available from the University of Tennessee Press in the Works of James Agee series: Complete Film Criticism: Reviews, Essays, and Manuscripts. As I've indicated in a couple of previous posts—click here and here—it's a work with which I'm intimately familiar, having copyedited the manuscript. Perhaps that makes me a bit biased when I sing its praises, but so be it.

There have been collections of Agee's film writings before but none as comprehensive as this. Volume editor Charles Maland secured the help of the archivist at Time, Inc. in identifying every one of Agee's unsigned reviews for the newsmagazine and now all those reviews are available between hard covers for the first time. Previous collections have included only a smattering of the Time reviews, several of which were misattributed to Agee. All of the Nation reviews are here, of course, including Agee's critique of It's a Wonderful Life, inexplicably omitted from previous collections. Included as well are writings that were unpublished during the writer's lifetime along with pieces that appeared in publications other than the two magazines with which he was most identified as a film critic. All told, it's essential reading for anyone interested in 1940s cinema and the very particular perspective on it offered by one of America's most gifted writers.

For more information, check out this description on the UT Press website.