It was at Phillips Exeter that Agee first became interested in writing, perhaps only because of the social distinction it afforded a poor southern boy at an exclusive northern school. One of his first role models at the school was Dwight MacDonald, who had graduated several years before Agee and gone on to Yale. Agee began a correspondence with MacDonald during these years that would last most of his lifetime, and with MacDonald's help he later secured a job at Fortune magazine. By the time Agee had matriculated at Harvard in 1928, he was committed to both the aesthetic and professional aspects of a literary career, writing poetry and prose and editing the
Harvard Advocate during his career there. Agee also formed an important literary friendship at Harvard with his classmate Robert Fitzgerald, who would later become a noted translator.
In 1931 Agee fell under the influence of a visiting Harvard professor, I. A. Richards, whose theories about using language to embody physical reality greatly affected Agee's writing during the 1930s. The most important direct influence Richards's theories had upon Agee's approach to his art involves an increased role for the narrator in Agee's stories. Because he was impressed by Richards's idea that the final effect of any poetic endeavor depends upon the complex relationship between the poem, referent, and reader, Agee decided that it would increase chances for the original poetic experience to be communicated if his first-person narrators not only served as major characters in the chronological narrative, but also as aestheticians who explain the problems of perception involved in their secondary roles as intermediaries between the experience and the audience.
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