James Agee

This volume provides the significant materials which seem of most importance for understanding James Agee's progression from an ambitious beginner to an accomplished writer who could, as he once wrote, "turn on the valve like a water faucet and write." This selection of documents spans over twenty-five years in Agee's career and demonstrates his movement as a writer who first mastered conventional prose and then went on to develop distinctive methods of writing based on an intensely felt awareness of the need to observe and "honor" reality.

These essays provide detailed analyses of both James Agee's life and writings. Especially, they illuminate aspects of his literary career as it developed through refinements and change. Paired, the twelve essays work in groups to demonstrate that Agee's accomplishments were varied, while at the core of his writing remains his concern for what he once called the "dignity of acutlaity."

Memory is astonishing and elusive--its threads intricately woven and infinitely complicated. It makes intelligible the chaos of experience; it feeds our creativity and shapes our daily judgments, our spiritual apprehensions, our desires. It is the essential element of human consciousness, the key to our personality, and the linchpin of our sense of who we are. In The Anatomy of Memory James McConkey has assembled a rich selection of writings that illuminate the nature of memory and the varied roles it plays in our lives. Ranging from the scientific to the humanistic--from "hardwiring" and the complex functions of the brain, to the value of memory in human life--The Anatomy of Memory brings us insights from some of the most revered writers and thinkers of the past and present. We read of St. Augustine's struggle in Confessions to comprehend his memory; of Jung's theory of the collective unconscious; of Lewis Thomas's understanding in The Lives of the Cell of memory at its most basic level, that of the cell. McConkey includes the poetry of Marianne Moore and William Butler Yeats; and excerpts from works as diverse as James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, and Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk. Indeed, each of these writers has turned to memory to make sense of his or her own life, to understand the phenomenal world, and to discover the balance only memory can provide. Not least important are McConkey's own extensive introductions to every piece in the book--gems of insight formed by a lifetime of reflection on writers such as Anton Chekhov, E. B. White, Marcel Proust, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Maya Angelou, William James, Norman Maclean, Eudora Welty, and many others. James McConkey is ideally suited to illuminate the nature of memory. His fiction as well as his non-fiction is in effect a lifelong meditation on memory, on the process by which we come to deeper levels of self-understanding through periodic looks backward at the events that have shaped us, a theme he explored most profoundly in his much-praised Court of Memory. Now, in The Anatomy of Memory, he provides a powerful assessment of the ways memory unifies disparate experiences, creates a synthesis out of chaos, and binds together a self, a family, a culture, and indeed all humanity. That assessment is abetted by the unique structure of this anthology, its six sections building on each other, each contributing to a comprehensive understanding of memory's essential role in human life.

..."This book promises to be a useful reference source and would be a welcome addition to public and high school libraries....The book's focus makes it unique..." Booklist

..."The scholarship is meticulous and the essays are lucid and perceptive..." Library Journal

Sitting in his study, William Carlos Williams once revealed to Robert Coles what he considered to be his greatest problem in writing a documentary about his patients in New Jersey. "When I'm there, sitting with those folks, listening and talking," he said to Coles, "I'm part of that life, and I'm near it in my head, too.... Back here, sitting near this typewriter--its different. I'm a writer. I'm a doctor living in Rutherford who is describing 'a world elsewhere.'" Williams captured the great difficulty in documentary writing--the gulf that separates the reality of the subject from the point of view of the observer . Now, in this thought-provoking volume, the renowned child psychiatrist Robert Coles, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Children in Crisis series, offers a penetrating look into the nature of documentary work. Utilizing the documentaries of writers, photographers, and others, Coles shows how their prose and pictures are influenced by the observer's frame of reference: their social and educational background, personal morals, and political beliefs. He discusses literary documentaries: James Agee's searching portrait of Depression-era tenant farmers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and George Orwell's passionate description of England's coal-miners, The Road to Wigan Pier. Like many documentarians, Coles argues, Agee and Orwell did not try to be objective, but instead showered unadulterated praise on the "noble" poor and vituperative contempt on the more privileged classes (including themselves) for "exploiting" these workers. Documentary photographs could be equally revealing about the observer. Coles analyzes how famous photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorthea Lange edited and cropped their pictures to produce a desired effect. Even the shield of the camera could not hide the presence of the photographer. Coles also illuminates his points through his personal portraits of William Carlos Williams; Robert Moses, one of the leaders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee during the 1960s; Erik H. Erikson, biographer of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther; and others. Documentary work, Coles concludes, is more a narrative constructed by the observer than a true slice of reality. With the growth in popularity of films such as Ken Burns's The Civil War and the controversial basketball documentary Hoop Dreams, the question of what is "real" in documentary work is more pressing than ever. Through revealing discussions with documentarians and insightful analysis of their work, complemented by dramatic black-and-white photographs from Lange and Evans, Doing Documentary Work will provoke the reader into reconsidering how fine the line is between truth and fiction. It is an invaluable resource for students of the documentary and anyone interested in this important genre.