A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

James Agee (1909-1955)

The morning of Harvard’s commencement ceremony in 1932, James Agee rushed over to Sanders Theatre with his convocation ode, which he had been elected to perform in front of his graduating class. He had composed the poem only the night before, finishing it shortly before he was to deliver it. In his rush to arrive on time, he forgot his mortarboard and hastily borrowed one from a female colleague; when he ascended the stage to present his ode, he found that he was wearing a conspicuously red Radcliffe tassel.

James Rufus Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler. His father was killed in a car accident when Agee was only six, and the tragedy left a lasting impression. His devout Christian mother found the strength to prevail through her faith in God, and, at the same time, she sent her children away to a Christian boarding school. There, Agee found refuge in the friendship of Father James Harold Flye, who replaced the absence of his father and the lack of warmth Agee received from his sanctimonious mother. Early on, he struggled with his faith in God, who provided, on the one hand, the security he felt in school, but who, on the other hand, arbitrarily let his father die. These irreconcilable doubts, paired with the torment he felt at the hands of inevitable mortality, stayed with Agee until he died.

Father Flye became Agee’s lifelong confidant from the time he was a child at Saint Andrews School, and it is his correspondence with Flye that often reveals Agee’s deepest insecurities and concerns. He once told Flye, “I’d do anything on earth to become a really great writer. That’s as sincere a thing as I’ve ever said.” During his college years, Agee served as the editor of The Harvard Advocate, where he published many of his own poems and stories. He was proud to be at Harvard, but also enjoyed poking fun at its magisterial air, once referring in the Advocate to “that high-falutin flub-drubbery which is Harvard.” He used this sense of humor to do a parody of Time magazine, the skill of which, ironically, landed him a writing job with Fortune magazine, headed by the same newsman, who was impressed with his style.

While writing for Fortune, Agee published his first volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage, in 1934, which contains a foreword by Archibald MacLeish. He began to feel that his writing projects for the magazine were impersonal and soulless, devoid of creativity. In 1936, one of his assignments led him to travel through the deep South, documenting the lives of poor farmers. Shortly after finishing the job, he resigned from the magazine, using the material he had gathered to write Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, released in 1941.

After leaving Fortune, Agee picked up a job as a film critic for Time magazine, and then The Nation. He also served as screenwriter for both The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter. Controversy surrounded his contribution to The Night of the Hunter when rumors arose that he did not actually write the screenplay. This charge was, however, proved false when, in 2004, his original manuscript was found. His criticisms were collected in Agee on Film, and many of his original manuscripts were recently published in scholarly editions of his work by the University of Tennessee Press in Agee’s native Knoxville.

Despite the moderate success Agee gained as a writer, his personal life had been on a downward spiral from the time he was a young man. He divorced his first wife, Via Saunders, after only five years of marriage. His marriage to his second wife, Alma Mailman, proved to be even shorter, when she left him, taking with her his only son. Later he married Mia Fritsch, with whom he had three children; they remained married until his death. His penchant for heavy drinking and smoking was beginning to take a toll on his health, and both of these vices were large contributors to his heart disease. He once told Father Flye, “I realize that I have an enormously strong drive, on a universally broad front, toward self-destruction.”

In the last years of his life, Agee began working on one of his most famous works, A Death in the Family, which is based on the personal trauma he suffered after his own father’s death. Unfortunately, he did not live to see it published. He died from a heart attack in a New York City cab when he was 45, three years before he would be awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his last novel.

If you are walking down 15th Street in Knoxville, a seemingly random arrangement of large red figures comes into view. Keep walking, and you will notice, at only one point during the trip, that the statues come together to form the word “Moment.” This memorial was erected in James Agee Park in 2005, perhaps meant to signify a life that lasted for only a brief moment in time, ended by a tragic self-destruction, but leaving a lasting legacy.

Arna Bontemps (1902-1973)

Born in Alexandria, Louisiana, on October 13, 1902, Arna W. Bontemps began life with roots in the Southern United States. But at age 3, Bontemps moved with his family to California, escaping the racism of the South. When Bontemps’s mother died, he was sent to live with his uncle who introduced him to Southern black culture. This exposure triggered a lifelong fascination with Southern culture, which Bontemps held for the rest of his life.

Arna Bontemps graduated from Pacific Union College and published his first poem, “Hope,” shortly after graduation, winning several awards for his poetry. Bright-eyed, young, and idealistic, he moved to Harlem, New York to teach. In Harlem Renaissance Remembered, Bontemps recollects the excitement he felt upon his first view of Harlem: “I looked over the rooftops of Negrodom and tried to believe my eyes. What a city! What a world!” Harlem had a heavy influence on Bontemps: He became an active member of the Harlem Renaissance, and he later became known as one of the world’s leading experts on the cultural movement. One of Bontemps’s best known novels, God Sends Sunday, was written during his stay in Harlem and later was adapted into a mildly successful stage play, St. Louis Woman.

While in New York, Bontemps met and married his wife Alberta Johnson, with whom he would have six children. Because of economic conditions brought on by the Depression, they were forced to move south, where Bontemps found a job teaching at Oakwood Junior College in Alabama. There, in collaboration with his good friend Langston Hughes, he wrote Popa and Fifina: Children of Haiti, one of his first successful works of children’s fiction. However, his tenure at Oakwood was short-lived. Bontemps was forced to leave his teaching position there when he refused to burn his collection of “pagan” books, deemed unworthy by the headmaster. Bontemps eventually relocated to Chicago, where he obtained a Master’s degree in library science from the University of Chicago.

After graduating, Bontemps accepted the position of head librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he developed one of the best collections of African-American literature and culture. He also wrote another children’s novel, The Story of the Negro, which received the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award and was a Newbery Honor Book. After the success of The Story of the Negro, Bontemps realized that there was a need for this kind of writing in children’s literature. In the introduction to his novel Black Thunder, he described one of his reasons for deviating from writing adult fiction and poetry: “I began to consider the alternative of trying to reach young readers not yet hardened or grown insensitive to man’s inhumanity to man, as it is called.”

Bontemps remained at Fisk for twenty-two years. After retiring in 1965, he served as director of Fisk’s public relations and one year later became a professor at the University of Illinois. During this time his Great Slave Narratives was published. Three years later, Bontemps went to Yale University where he lectured and was the curator of the James Weldon Johnson Collection. He returned to Fisk University in 1971 as writer-in-residence.

Bontemps was prolific and versatile, publishing over forty works including poetry, fiction, history, plays, and biography. His life was devoted to making a difference and giving back to his African American heritage. He once said of the Harlem Renaissance writers, “Once they find a (united) voice, they will bring a fresh and fierce sense of reality to their vision of human life…What American literature needs at this moment is color, music, gusto….” His devotion to children’s literature reflects his desire for young African Americans to appreciate their heritage and its influence in art and literature.

Bontemps was working on his autobiography when he died in 1973. With his birth home preserved as a museum included on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail, Bontemps’s efforts toward the appreciation and preservation of African American culture will never be forgotten.

Roark Bradford (1896-1948)

Roark Bradford, novelist, short story writer, and journalist, was born in Lauderdale County, where he was raised on a cotton plantation in the Nankipoo-Knob Creek area. The African Americans who worked the farm and with whom he attended church strongly influenced him. He closely observed their lives and drew on his early experiences to create his fiction.

Bradford received his education at home, in local public schools, and at the University of California, where he earned an LL.B. degree shortly before the United States entered World War I. He volunteered for military service and was posted as an artillery officer to the Panama Canal Zone; afterwards he taught military science at a Mississippi college. Following his discharge in 1920, Bradford took a series of reporting jobs in Georgia and Louisiana and eventually became Sunday editor for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He left newspaper work in 1926 to devote himself to writing.

As a writer, Bradford pursued a lifelong interest in the culture and language of southern African Americans. He both admired black culture and was puzzled by it, and his prose reflects this conflict. From his studies of black speech, Bradford observed that African Americans created a beautiful and rhythmic language, and he deeply appreciated black music for its expressive, creative character.

African American religion remained at the heart of Bradford’s fiction. Drawing on childhood memories and the influence of local African American ministers, Bradford created a body of literature that pitted a good-natured God against an equally good-natured Satan. One of his first stories, “Child of God,” published in Harper’s, won an O. Henry Memorial Award in 1927. He followed that success with Ol’ Man Adam an’ His Chillun (1928), which playwright Marc Connelly adapted into a 1930 smash-hit biblical fantasy, The Green Pastures. The play ran seventy-three weeks in New York and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Bradford’s stories and novels sold well among contemporary readers but today are considered racist and sentimental. Bradford’s decline in popularity coincided with the Harlem Renaissance, which gave a lasting black voice to black literature. In 1946 he accepted a position in the English department at Tulane University, which was just then launching an innovative program for creative writing. Bradford died in New Orleans in 1948 from an illness he contracted during World War II while on active duty in Africa.

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924)

Born in Manchester, England on November 24, 1849, Frances Eliza Hodgson was the eldest daughter in a family of two boys and three girls. After her father’s death when she was three years old, the Hodgsons experienced severe financial difficulties. As a young girl, she would scrawl little stories on sheets of old notebooks, as she was unable to afford proper writing materials. In 1865 the family moved to Tennessee where they lived in a log cabin and the teenage Frances set up a little school. She began submitting stories to women’s magazines and in a time when most women did not have careers, Frances Eliza Hodgson was a literary success. In 1873 she married Dr. Swan Burnett and they had two sons — Lionel, born 1874, and Vivian, born 1876 — but the marriage was not a happy one. Her younger son, Vivian, clamored for something for little boys to read, so Frances wrote “Little Lord Fauntleroy” and modeled the main character after him. In 1890 tragedy struck when her eldest son, Lionel, died of influenza. Frances and Swan separated and finally divorced in 1898, and she went on to remarry Stephen Townshend. Frances moved to Long Island, New York in 1901 and there began to write her two most famous stories — A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, inspired by her poor childhood and her love for gardening. She became rather eccentric in her old age, but delighted in her grandchildren. Frances Hodgson Burnett died on October 19, 1924.

John William Corrington (1932-1988)

John William Corrington was born in Ohio in 1932; his family moved to Shreveport, Louisiana when he was a young boy. He may have been born in Ohio, and spent some his boyhood years there, but it was Louisiana and, more particularly, Shreveport that Corrington adopted as his spiritual and literary home. It was growing up in Shreveport that he developed a great love for that city and for the South, a love which figures prominently in his life and his writing. Corrington stayed on in Shreveport during his college years to attend Centenary College, where he met a small group of teachers whom he revered and honored throughout his life.

Corrington received a B.A. degree from Centenary College in 1956 and his M.A. from Rice University in 1960, the year he took on his first teaching position in the English Department at LSU. While on leave from LSU, Corrington obtained his D.Phil. in 1965 from the University of Sussex (England) and then, in 1966, moved to Loyola University-New Orleans as Associate Professor of English, where he also served as chair of the English Department. Corrington’s early writing included poetry, novels, short stories, and academic writing that might best be labeled literary criticism. He would later write crime/detective fiction and screenplays in collaboration with his wife, Joyce Corrington.

At age forty, Corrington decided to study law. He obtained his J.D. from Tulane Law School in 1975. (Corrington’s father had studied law, but was in the insurance business, and never practiced.) After graduating from Tulane Law School, Corrington practiced law in New Orleans for three years and the influence of his legal training and law practice soon found a place in his fiction. Corrington’s legal fiction consists of only six short stories (a newly discovered story was published in 2002) and two novellas. The novellas, published under the title All My Trials by the University of Arkansas Press in 1987, appeared the year before his death.

Corrington gave up the practice of law after three years to pursue his TV, literary and intellectual history writing projects. He died in Malibu, California. Joyce Corrington, his wife, co-author and collaborator, survives him and continues to make her home in Malibu.

During the 1960s, Corrington taught English literature, wrote poetry, published academic papers, and wrote his first novels. His first poetry was published in 1957 and his first collection of poetry, Where We Are, appeared in 1962. Three more collections would follow: The Anatomy of Love and Other Poems (1964); Mr. Clean and Other Poems (1964); and Lines to the South and Other Poems (1965), all published while Corrington was teaching English at LSU, working on his doctorate, and getting his first novel underway. During his early years as a poet, Corrington discovered the poetry of Charles Bukowski, a poet whose work still receives attention. Corrington wrote several admiring essays about Bukowski’s poetry, was active in seeing Bukowski’s first major collection of poetry published, and carried on an extensive correspondence with the writer spanning the 1960s.

Corrington’s early promise as poet was displaced by his intense desire to write major fiction, and to develop his skills as a novelist. Corrington’s impressive first novel, And Wait for the Night, was published in 1964, and after he joined the faculty at Loyola-New Orleans, he published two additional novels, The Upper Hand (1967) and The Bombardiers (1970), as the decade ended.

In the late 60s, Corrington’s fiction came to the attention of film director/ producer Roger Corman. Corman approached Corrington about doing a screenplay about the German WW I pilot, Manfred von Richthofen (“The Red Baron”) and Corrington, never one to say no to a new writing venture, talked his wife, Joyce, a chemistry professor, into working on the script with him. Working together they wrote Von Richthofen and Brown (later released as The Red Baron) and delivered the finished script to Corman in 1969. The film was released by United Artists in 1971.

In addition to his 1960s novels, the new screenwriting venture with Joyce, and his four published collections of poetry, Corrington published his first collection of short stories, The Lonesome Traveler and Other Stories in 1968 and continued to write short fiction throughout his life. During his years as an English professor, Corrington also published a steady output of academic articles and essays (and wrote, but left un-published, a significant number of theoretical and philosophical writings).

The work with Roger Corman continued in the early 1970s, and the Corringtons—working together as they did on all of Corrington’s film script writing—followed up the film script for Von Richthofen and Brown (1971) with the following: The Omega Man (1970), Boxcar Bertha (1971), and The Arena (1972).

Corrington, who had never developed any great passion for teaching, growing increasingly disaffected with the situation at Loyola-New Orleans where he was battling with the Jesuits over tenure decisions in his English Department, decided to take up the study of law. It was, according to Corrington, his reading of the political philosopher Eric Voegelin that prompted his interest in the study of law.

Bill Corrington was not the typical first year law student. When he started Tulane Law School in 1972, he was forty years old, a well-published poet and novelist, a screenwriter, accomplished scholar, chair of an English department. Attending law school seems not to have left Corrington short of time and energy for his other writing pursuits. During his first year of law school, he and Joyce wrote the film script for The Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), and then, in his second year at Tulane, they finished work on The Killer Bees (1974).

Corrington graduated from Tulane Law School in 1975, joined a small New Orleans personal injury law firm, Plotkin & Bradley, and spent the next three years practicing law. He would never return to teaching, although he sometimes considered the possibility, thinking he might make his way back to Shreveport, or to settle somewhere in the South.

After taking up the study of law, Corrington began to make lawyers and judges (and the law) a part of his fiction. “The Actes and Monuments,” Corrington’s first lawyer story, was published in Sewanee Review in 1975, the year he finished law school. A second lawyer story, “Pleadings,” was published in 1976 in the Southern Review, appearing during Corrington’s first year as a practicing lawyer. A third story, “Every Act Whatever of Man,” followed in the Southern Review in 1978, this one in the final year of his law practice. Corrington continued, throughout the 1980s, until his death in 1988, to make the lives of lawyers and judges a part of his fiction.

Corrington gave up the practice of law in 1978, and working with Joyce, they became head writers for the TV daytime drama, Search for Tomorrow (CBS). From 1978 to 1988, the Corringtons wrote scripts for Search for Tomorrow (CBS) (1978-80) (477 episodes); Another World (1980) (NBC) (23 episodes); Texas, a series they created and wrote, 1980-82 (NBC) (147 episodes); General Hospital (1982) (ABC) (54 episodes); Capitol (1982-83) (CBS) (167 episodes); One Life to Live (1984) (ABC) (98 episodes); and finally, Superior Court, a syndicated series (1986-89) (238 episodes).

During the final decade of his life, the decade he worked as a writer of daytime TV dramas, Corrington published his last major novel, Shad Sentell (1984), a collection of short stories, The Southern Reporter (1981), and two magnificent novellas featuring lawyers, published as All My Trials (1987).

Corrington, always in search of a new venture as a writer, eventually turned to the detective genre. With a contract from Viking Press, Corrington, in partnership with Joyce, begin a series of books which featured a New Orleans police detective–Ralph “Rat” Trapp–a reporter named Wesley Colvin, and a love interest for Colvin, named Denise Lemoyne, who begins as an relatively insignificant character, but becomes Colvin’s lover and, finally, an Assistant District Attorney. The first of the Corringtons’ police detective/mystery novels, So Small a Carnival, appeared in 1986, with A Project Named Desire and A Civil Death following in 1987. The fourth and final book in the series, The White Zone, was published in 1990, after Bill Corrington’s death in 1988.

Louise Littleton Davis (1911-1995)

Louise Littleton Davis, historian and journalist, was born in Paris, Tennessee, one of the five children of Grover C., a career United States army officer, and LaRue Littleton Davis, a musician. Although born in Paris, she left the state at an early age. She was educated in the public schools of St. Louis, at Washington University, the University of North Carolina, and Vanderbilt, where she earned a Master of Arts degree.

Davis’ journalistic career began in 1943 covering the Tennessee legislature for the Associated Press. At the close of that session she joined the staff of the Nashville Tennessean. Miss Davis soon became a feature writer noted for the careful craftsmanship of her writing and the warm human interest of her stories. As a reporter she covered topics ranging from agriculture to juvenile crime; then she moved to the newspaper’s magazine where she became well known for her knowledge of history and love of research. Exceptionally skilled at oral interview, Davis talked with persons from all walks of life, including Harry Truman, Lord Halisham, Anthony Eden, Gregor Piatigorsky, and Cardinal Stritch. She reported from the Netherlands, England, France, and many other nations. Semi-retiring in 1977, she continued working part-time at the newspaper until 1984.

In the 1950s Silliman Evans, who had come from Texas as publisher of Nashville Tennessean, encouraged Davis to write local history out of a belief that Tennesseans did not realize or appreciate the richness of their past. Her books include Nashville Tales, More Nashville Tales, Snowball Fight in the White House, Children’s Museum of Nashville: The First 30 Years, Frontier Tales of Tennessee and More Tales of Tennessee. At the time of her death she was writing a biography of Captain William Driver for the Smithsonian Institution.

In 1987 Davis was unanimously elected Davidson County historian. She was credited with sparking the movement that preserved the Union Station from demolition and with the establishment of the Friends of Metro Archives. She also served on the Metropolitan Nashville Historical Commission, the Tennessee Historical Society, the Query Club, and the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities. She was a charter member of the Cheekwood Fine Arts Center and the Nashville Symphony Association. She died at her home in Nashville on September 7, 1995.

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