James Agee

Decades after its original publication, James Agee's last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man's death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed. On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying....

At the start of World War I, German imperial troops burn down a mission in Africa. The mission's reverend was so overtaken with disappointment that he passes away. Shortly after his well-educated, snooty sister Rose buries her brother, she must leave on the only available transport, the 'African Queen' steamboat. The boat is manned by the ill-mannered bachelor, Charlie. Together they embark on a long difficult journey, without any comfort. Rose grows...

'Mr. Lincoln' (1952) was an ambitious five-part biographical drama by renowned author, screenwriter and film critic James Agee that revealed the early life of America's foremost political icon. Three additional Civil War-themed Omnibus presentations: 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (1955), an excerpt from the Harriet Beecher Stowe classic adapted by Ellen Violett; 'The Four Flags of the Confederacy' (1955), a 14-minute historical feature by Arnold Sundgaard;...

A self-styled preacher marries and murders the widow of an executed convict with whom he once shared a cell. He then terrorizes her two young children to force them to tell him the whereabouts of the $10,000 he knows their father hid before his imprisonment.