James Rufus Agee

Agee's father died in a car accident in 1916, when James was six, and the boy was sent to boarding school, most notably St. Andrew's near Sewanee, where he began a lifelong friendship with Father James Harold Flye. At 25 he published Knoxville: Summer of 1915, a prose poem that Samuel Barber later set to music. He wrote the screenplays for The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sold about 600 copies at first and came to be seen as his masterpiece. He died in a New York taxi at 45.

What the plaque says

James Rufus Agee Born in Knoxville, November 27, 1909, Agee was well known and respected in the fields of journalism, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and film. He won a Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1957 for A Death in the Family, a novel based on his youth in the Fort Sanders neighborhood at 1505 Highland Avenue and the trauma of his father's death. He died May 16, 1955.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blount Mansion — 0.8 mi
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.
• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 2.0 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 15 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• Museum of Appalachia — 17 mi
  John Rice Irwin's 65-acre collection of moved log cabins and mountain objects north of Knoxville, opened in 1969, with a cabin believed to be Mark Twain's father's.

More markers nearby

• General Clifton Bledsoe Cates 1895-1970 United States Marine Corps — steps away
• Fort Byington — steps away
• University of Tennessee — steps away
• Desegregation of the University of Tennessee — steps away