American Writers (One Hundred Pages at a Time)

The end of this series on H. P. Lovecraft's letters. This set is a doozy with some monster letters to Frank B. Long, Wilfred Talman, and Woodburn Prescott Harris.

In this final episode on James Agee, I look at his shorter fiction, including "Morning Watch" and "Death in the Desert". They are all pretty excellent and worth checking out.

Lovecraft's letters in 1928 ranged in topics from literature to modernism to race and class. I review some of these letters as I continue to work my way through the second volume of The Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft.

In this episode I finish up my look at James Agee's novel A DEATH IN A FAMILY. I find the novel a bit more interesting in the second half as Agee explores issues of race, childhood, and maturation.

The highlight of the H. P. Lovecraft letters from the winter of 1927-28 is Lovecraft's account of a story-length Roman dream. He mediates quite a lot about the Romans and their history, in seeming preparation for his debates with Robert E. Howard.

The first part of my review of James Agee's DEATH IN THE FAMILY. This posthumously published novel won the Pulitzer Prize. I found it to be of interest, but a bit of a slog.

The H. P. Lovecraft letters I look at in this episode cover much of the second half of 1927. There is not much in the way of philosophy, but professionally it is an important period with the submission of "The Call of Cthulhu".

The episode in which I try to make some final sense of James Agee's LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN. I am pretty sure I am only scratching the surface.

Let's look at some more of H. P. Lovecraft's letters. In this episode I explore the ones he wrote in 1927. There are a few good and important letters here such as one to Donald Wanderi on metaphysics and one to Bernard Dwyer on culture, migration and modernism.

Part three of my review of LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN by James Agee. In this part of the book, Agee continues his report on the material conditions of life for the three sharecropping families. It will get weird again at the end.