Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Letters of James Agee to Father Flye
Yet as the course of these letters proclaims, no Ameri can writer, not even Henry James, ever had a more explicit, precocious, and God-fearing sense of a literary vocation. It is hard to be precise about just what this means, but covering pages with sentences is certainly at the heart of it; that, and a need (a need greater than any talent or luck or ambition) to use language to incarnate a part of oneself which no other medium, including one's own ?esh, will ever be adequate to. In varying degree, there is also the delight of playing the literary game, of making shapes with words, putting oblongs on squares, as Virginia Woolf has described it.
In all of these senses, james Agee had a marked voca tion for literature. The earliest of these letters, written when he was not quite sixteen, mentions a story and two or three poems he is having published in the Exeter Monthly. In the very last letter, written a few days before his death, he speaks of taking the summer off to finish my book. In between, over a period of thirty years, there is hardly a let ter in which his calling is not mentioned or implied. And then listen to this, written in November, 1930, when he was twenty - one and still at Harvard.
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