Wildly productive during his short life, James Agee (1909-1955) is today perhaps best remembered as a novelist-his posthumously published A Death in the Family won a Pulitzer Prize in 1958-but he was also a poet, screenwriter, journalist, essayist, book reviewer, and movie critic. In The Making of James Agee, Hugh Davis takes a comprehensive look at Agee's career, showing the interrelatedness of his concerns as a writer. A full view of Agee's oeuvre, Davis argues, illuminates its deeply political nature as well as a debt to various sources, particularly European surrealism, that have been...