Today is the birthday of James Agee (screenwriter - essayist)

from Writer's Almanac (Garrison Keillor, American Public Media):

Today is the birthday of writer James Agee, born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1909. Today, he is best remembered for his two books, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), the classic profile of three sharecropper families, photographed by Walker Evans, and A Death in the Family (1958), his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel based on his own father's tragic passing. The former was practically unread when it was published; the latter was published posthumously. What Agee was at least modestly known for during his lifetime was his film criticism, which he wrote for Time magazine and The Nation.
"You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition," Agee wrote, and his reviews followed his own advice. As he promised at the outset of his weekly column in The Nation in 1942, "As an amateur, then, I must as well as I can simultaneously recognize my own ignorance and feel no apology for what my eyes tell me as I watch any given screen, where the proof is caught irrelevant to excuse, and available in proportion to the eye which sees it and the mind which uses it." He did so, calling it as he saw it week in and week out, with little attention to popular sentiment or previous critical success -- or failure. An article he wrote for Life magazine proclaimed silent film was "Comedy's Greatest Era," then a somewhat revolutionary idea, especially to an entire generation who'd never seen a silent movie and assumed them to be old-fashioned and schmaltzy. The article received one of the largest responses of any in the magazine's history; it was also single-handedly responsible for reviving and redeeming the career of silent film auteur Buster Keaton, who by then had been largely consigned to writing gags for studio scripts. "Perhaps because 'dry' comedy is so much more rare and odd than 'dry' wit, there are people who never much cared for Keaton," Agee wrote. "Those who do cannot care mildly."
In 1944, two years after Agee began writing his column there, The Nation published a letter to the editor from W.H. Auden, in which the poet said: "... I do not care for movies very much and I rarely see them; further, I am suspicious of criticism as the literary genre which, more than any other, recruits epigones, pedants without insight, intellectuals without love. I am all the more surprised, therefore, to find myself not only reading Mr. Agee before I read anyone else in The Nation but also consciously looking forward all week to reading him again. In my opinion, his column is the most remarkable regular event in American journalism today. What he says is of such profound interest, expressed with such extraordinary wit and felicity, and so transcends its ostensible -- to me, rather unimportant -- subject, that his articles belong in that very select class ... of newspaper work which is of permanent literary value. One foresees the sad day, indeed, when Agee on Films will be the subject of a Ph.D. thesis."
It was only 14 years later, three years after Agee's early death in 1955, that the book Agee on Film collected much of his criticism; in the year 2000 it was reissued with introductions by filmmaker Martin Scorsese and film critic David Denby.