Book Reviews

A week after H.G. Wells died in August 1946,James Agr.ee wrote in Time magazine that Wells' tragedy was "he lived long enough to have a second thought." That was the revelation that Wells' work and his hope to reach, and to ultimately save, the human race were in vain. One cannot help but wonder, after reading the nineteen articles by Agee that comprise Paul Ashdown's edited volume, James Agee: Selected Journalism, what the remarkably prescient-albeit unorthodox-Agee might have written about himself after his own death from a heart attack in 1955 at forty five. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1909, Agee became a poet, journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and social critic. He was perhaps best known for his posthumously awarded 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Fami(y, which was based in part on the death of his father in an automobile accident, and for the 1941 classic, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which documented the life of the poor Southern farmer and was produced with photographer Walker Evans. Like its 1985 predecessor of the same name, James Agee: Selected Journalism is a compilation of his essays published from 1933 to 1947 in Time and Fortune magazines. In the updated volume, Ashdown, a former journalist and now professor of journalism