Excerpt from Letters of James Agee to Father Flye Yet as the course of these letters proclaims, no Ameri can writer, not even Henry James, ever had a more explicit, precocious, and God-fearing sense of a literary vocation. It is hard to be precise about just what this means, but covering pages with sentences is certainly at the heart of it; that, and a need (a need greater than any talent or luck or ambition) to use language to incarnate a part of oneself which no other medium, including one's own flesh, will ever be adequate to. In varying degree, there is also the delight of playing the literary game, of making shapes with words, putting oblongs on squares, as Virginia Woolf has described it. In all of these senses, james Agee had a marked voca tion for literature. The earliest of these letters, written when he was not quite sixteen, mentions a story and two or three poems he is having published in the Exeter Monthly. In the very last letter, written a few days before his death, he speaks of taking the summer off to finish my book. In between, over a period of thirty years, there is hardly a let ter in which his calling is not mentioned or implied. And then listen to this, written in November, 1930, when he was twenty - one and still at Harvard. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.