The UT College of Liberal Arts (now Arts and Sciences) commemorated the 50th anniversary of the publication of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (photographs by Walker Evans) March 27–April 1, 1989. At the opening session, Dean of Libraries Paula Kaufman announced that Knoxville attorney, Lindsay Young, a 1935 law graduate, had given a $1 million gift to the library, a portion of which had been used to purchase rare papers of Agee’s.
Conference events included speakers Wilma Dykeman Stokely and North Carolina professor George Tindall. UT professor Michael Lofaro chaired special sections of scholarly papers on Agee, and UT Art professor Baldwin Lee (a student of Walker Evans) opened an exhibit of Evans’ photographs in the Ewing Gallery. On April 1 a marker designating the site of Agee’s childhood home was placed at the corner of Cumberland Avenue and Fifteenth Street (now James Agee Street).
In October 2009 the James Agee Centennial Celebration consisted of a monthlong series of events marking the 100th anniversary of Agee’s birth. During the celebration, the UT Libraries announced the purchase of a large collection of James Agee materials and the placement of the archives of the James Agee Trust at UT.
James Agee lived his youth “in the shadow” of UT and was the son of UT alumna Laura Tyler (attended 1901–3), and he was the nephew of alumnus Hugh Tyler (1905). Agee was a poet, film critic, fiction writer, and scriptwriter. He was the film critic for Time and Nation during the late ’30s and ’40s and spent most of his time during his later years writing fiction and film scripts, including collaborating with John Huston on the movie script for C. S. Forester’s The African Queen. He also wrote the script for The Night of the Hunter. Agee died in 1955 before finishing his one novel, A Death in the Family. The manuscript was extensively revised by his friend, David McDowell, and included the memorable opening passage: “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.”
UT professor of English, Michael Lofaro, utilized the Agee archives and other materials in his reconstruction of the book as originally penned by Agee, which was published in 2007 as A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author’s Text. Lofaro is also the general editor of the 10-volume The Works of James Agee and of other books and articles on Agee and his works. Agee’s A Death in the Family, as revised by McDowell, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958.