James Agee

Tad Mosel, a leading writer of live television dramas in the 1950s who won a Pulitzer Prize for "All the Way Home," his 1960 Broadway dramatization of James Agee's novel "A Death in the Family," has died. He was 86. Mosel, who had cancer and lived in...

Before World War I, when the Marx Brothers and their various relatives were knocking around the vaudeville circuit, one of their acts was a schoolroom act, titled "Fun in Hi Skule." Remnants of the act turned up in "Horse Feathers," one of the Marxes'...

On a couple of public occasions, I saw Manny Farber, the artist and critic who died Monday at age 91, deflect high-flown praise for his criticism and painting with the simple, emphatic words, "That's a lot of bunk." Even at his most challenging, as a...

On a couple of public occasions, I saw Manny Farber, the artist and critic who died last week at age 91, deflect high-flown praise for his criticism and painting with the simple, emphatic words, "That's a lot of bunk." Even at his most challenging, as a...

Manny Farber, an iconoclastic stylist who achieved prominence in two careers -- as a painter of abstract canvases and still-lifes and as a film critic admired for his canny, muscular writing and advocacy of such directors as Sam Fuller, Howard Hawks and...

The poet Weldon Kees was born in Beatrice, Neb., in 1914, though what's best known about him is that on July 18, 1955, his car was found abandoned with the keys still in the ignition in a parking lot on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge....

Edward Anderson had a strange and sad career. He was born in Texas in 1905 and grew up in Oklahoma, serving his apprenticeship as a journalist on a small paper in Ardmore, Okla. Restless, he worked as a deckhand on a freighter, plied his fists as a...

Daring to Look Dorothea Lange's Photographs & Reports From the Field Anne Whiston Spirn University of Chicago Press: 352 pp., $40 Dorothea Lange's photograph "Migrant Mother" (1936), which shows a plaintive, destitute woman surrounded by her...

Dorothea Lange's photograph "Migrant Mother" (1936), which shows a plaintive, destitute woman surrounded by her children at the height of the Depression, secured her place as one of the most distinguished documentary photographers of all time. That...

By Richard Rayner "Ulysses" (Vintage: $17 paper) is the description of a single day, June 16, 1904, a day in the mingled lives of characters walking, talking, dreaming, eating, drinking, mourning and climaxing their way through the hours of an average...

THE OTHER night, while channel surfing, I happened upon the famous final scene from John Ford's classic film, "The Grapes of Wrath." Hearing Henry Fonda's inspirational words about always being present, if only in spirit, whenever injustice was...

3½ stars (out of 4) David Gordon Green's "Undertow"--which stars Jamie Bell and Josh Lucas as a fugitive boy and his devilish uncle--is a contemporary Southern Gothic movie thriller, true to its roots but also true to our time. Easily, violently, Green's...