During the years of his education it was already clear that Agee could write tight poetry, prose, and fiction; but he also chose to step beyond predictable literary boundaries. He was consistently as interested in writing about fact as he was in constructing fiction.
The atmosphere at Phillips Exeter Academy was intellectually stimulating for the sixteen-year-old Agee . He became editor of the Phillips Exeter Monthly, and his own contributions to the periodical were so ambitious that one of his prep-school teachers later described him as phenomenal. He churned out poetry, prose, drama, and reviews; and while some of the work is immature, his enormous productivity demonstrates a multiplicity of interests.
Characteristics basic to his later successful literary production are already present in the writing completed at Exeter. An awareness of the transitoriness of human life and of man's fragility, a theme that later buttresses the poetry of Permit Me Voyage (1934), is especially evident.
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