In 1952 CBS, in conjunction with the Ford Foundation, launched Omnibus, a remarkable experiment in television. The objective was to raise the programming standards of an emerging medium that figured to profoundly influence American life. The centerpiece of Omnibus during its inaugural season was "Mr. Lincoln," a series of five films about the early life of our foremost political icon. James Agee, the distinguished American author, was the principal creator of "Mr. Lincoln." At the time, his scripts were hailed as 'the most beautiful writing ever done for television," and even today Agee's characterization of Lincoln remains " among the finest--perhaps the finest--film about Abraham Lincoln ever made." Regrettably, this important and sensitive work, a revealing expression of American culture at mid-century, has been consigned to the archives and has not been available to the public for many years. Author William Hughes aims to keep alive Agee's neglected masterpiece, placing "Mr. Lincoln" in the context of the period's prevailing ideology (Cold War liberalism) and conveying the institutional framework in which the work originated. In addition, Hughes takes into account Agee's personal experiences, his social and political views, and his related writings (for and about film), all of which came into play when he reworked the Lincoln legend for the television age. Based on extensive archive research and an interview with Norman Lloyd, who directed the five films, this book fully documents the cultural and historical importance of "Mr. Lincoln."

Frank J. Wetta and Martin A. Novelli’s Abraham Lincoln and Women in Film investigates how depictions of women in Hollywood motion pictures helped forge the myth of Lincoln. Exploring female characters’ backstories, the political and cultural climate in which the films appeared, and the contest between the moviemakers’ imaginations and the varieties of historical truth, Wetta and Novelli place the women in Lincoln’s life at the center of the study, including his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln; his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln; his lost loves, Ann Rutledge and Mary Owens; and his wife and widow, Mary Todd Lincoln. Later, while inspecting Lincoln’s legacy, they focus on the 1930s child actor Shirley Temple and the 1950s movie star Marilyn Monroe, who had a well-publicized fascination with the sixteenth president. Wetta and Novelli’s work is the first to deal extensively with the women in Lincoln’s life, both those who interacted with him personally and those appearing on screen. It is also among the first works to examine how scholarly and popular biography influenced depictions of Lincoln, especially in film.

Drawn mainly from the centennial anniversary symposium on James Agee held at the University of Tennessee in the fall of 2009, the essays of Agee at 100 are as diverse in topic and purpose as is Agee’s work itself. Often devalued during his life by those who thought his breadth a hindrance to greatness, Agee’s achievements as a poet, novelist, journalist, essayist, critic, documentarian, and screenwriter are now more fully recognized. With its use of previously unknown and recently recovered materials as well as established works, this groundbreaking new collection is a timely contribution to the resurgence of interest in Agee’s significance. The essays in this collection range from the scholarly to the personal, and all offer insight into Agee’s writing, his cultural influence, and ultimately Agee himself. Dwight Garner opens with his reflective essay on “Why Agee Matters.” Several essays present almost entirely new material on Agee. Paul Ashdown writes on Agee’s book reviews, which, unlike Agee’s film criticism, have received scant attention. With evidence from two largely unstudied manuscripts, Jeffrey Couchman sets the record straight on Agee’s contribution to the screenplay for The African Queen and delves as well into his television “miniseries” screenplay Mr. Lincoln. John Wranovics treats Agee’s lesser-known films--the documentaries In the Street and The Quiet One and the Filipino epic Genghis Khan. Jeffrey J. Folks wrestles with Agee’s “culture of repudiation” while James A. Crank investigates his perplexing treatment of race in his prose. Jesse Graves and Andrew Crooke provide new analyses of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Michael A. Lofaro and Philip Stogdon both discuss Lofaro’s recently restored text of A Death in the Family. David Madden closes the collection with his short story “Seeing Agee in Lincoln,” an imagined letter from Agee to his longtime confidante Father Flye. The contributors to Agee at 100 utilize materials new and old to reveal the true importance of Agee's range of cultural sensibility and literary ability. Film scholars will also find this collection particularly engrossing, as will anyone fascinated by the work of the author rightly deemed the “sovereign prince of the English language.” Michael A. Lofaro is Lindsay Young Professor of American Literature and American and Cultural Studies at the University of Tennessee. Most recently, he restored James Agee’s A Death in the Family and is the general editor of the projected eleven-volume The Works of James Agee.

"In The Making of James Agee, Hugh Davis takes a comprehensive look at Agee's career, showing the interrelatedness of his concerns as a writer. A full view of Agee's oeuvre, Davis argues, illuminates its deeply political nature and reveals a debt to various sources, particularly European surrealism, that have been little noted by previous Agee scholars." "Davis challenges the view of Agee that has persisted since his death - that he is best understood primarily as a romantic individualist at odds with convention and the literary mainstream - and argues that this myth was largely constructed by friends and associates who were so immersed in the tenets of modernism that they distorted Agee's work (and aesthetic intent) in an attempt to purify it in modernist terms. In revealing a writer of far greater complexity than the myth allows, Davis explores, for example, the leftist poetry that Agee wrote in the 1930s, which was almost completely suppressed by his editors. He also throws a fresh light on Agee's collaboration with photographer Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and reevaluates A Death in the Family in light of recent scholarship that has produced an almost entirely new version of the novel, one much closer to Agee's original intentions."--BOOK JACKET.

It’s difficult to overestimate the impact of the many new works by James Agee uncovered and published in the last twenty years. These previously unknown primary works have, in turn, encouraged a parallel explosion of critical evaluation and reevaluation by scholars, to which James Agee in Context is the latest contribution. This superb collection from well-known James Agee scholars features myriad approaches and contexts for understanding the author’s fiction, poetry, journalism, and screenwriting. The essays bring the reader from the streets of James Agee’s New York to travel with the author from Alabama to Hollywood to Havana. Contributors explore overlapping and sometimes unique subjects, themes, and accomplishments (or lack thereof) in Agee’s uncovered works and highlight the diversity of interest that Agee’s complete body of work inspires. The insightful scholarship on influence examines connections between Agee and Wright Morris, Helen Levitt, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Stephen Crane. Such juxtapositions serve to illustrate how Agee drew on literary influences as a young man, how he used his work as a journalist to craft fiction as he was about to turn thirty, and his influence upon others. The volume concludes with three poems and a short story by Agee, all previously unknown. It seems astonishing that so much remains to be discovered about this protean author, his materials, and his circle. Yet, the recovery and analysis of neglected texts and information mined from newspapers and magazines proves the extent to which Agee kept his mind and his work, as he himself put it, “patiently concentrated upon the essential quietudes of the human soul.”

Lincoln's death, like his life, was an event of epic proportions. When the president was struck down at his moment of triumph, writes Merrill Peterson, "sorrow--indescribable sorrow" swept the nation. After lying in state in Washington, Lincoln's body was carried by a special funeral train to Springfield, Illinois, stopping in major cities along the way; perhaps a million people viewed the remains as memorial orations rang out and the world chorused its sincere condolences. It was the apotheosis of the martyred President--the beginning of the transformation of a man into a mythic hero. In Lincoln in American Memory, historian Merrill Peterson provides a fascinating history of Lincoln's place in the American imagination from the hour of his death to the present. In tracing the changing image of Lincoln through time, this wide-ranging account offers insight into the evolution and struggles of American politics and society--and into the character of Lincoln himself. Westerners, Easterners, even Southerners were caught up in the idealization of the late President, reshaping his memory and laying claim to his mantle, as his widow, son, memorial builders, and memorabilia collectors fought over his visible legacy. Peterson also looks at the complex responses of blacks to the memory of Lincoln, as they moved from exultation at the end of slavery to the harsh reality of free life amid deep poverty and segregation; at more than one memorial event for the great emancipator, the author notes, blacks were excluded. He makes an engaging examination of the flood of reminiscences and biographies, from Lincoln's old law partner William H. Herndon to Carl Sandburg and beyond. Serious historians were late in coming to the topic; for decades the myth-makers sought to shape the image of the hero President to suit their own agendas. He was made a voice of prohibition, a saloon-keeper, an infidel, a devout Christian, the first Bull Moose Progressive, a military blunderer and (after the First World War) a military genius, a white supremacist (according to D.W. Griffith and other Southern admirers), and a touchstone for the civil rights movement. Through it all, Peterson traces five principal images of Lincoln: the savior of the Union, the great emancipator, man of the people, first American, and self-made man. In identifying these archetypes, he tells us much not only of Lincoln but of our own identity as a people.

"[A]n astonishingly interesting interpretation…Fox is wonderfully shrewd and often dazzling." —Jill Lepore, New York Times Book Review Abraham Lincoln remains America’s most beloved leader. The fact that he was lampooned in his day as "ugly and grotesque" only made Lincoln more endearing to millions. In Lincoln’s Body, acclaimed cultural historian Richard Wightman Fox explores how deeply, and how differently, Americans—black and white, male and female, Northern and Southern—have valued our sixteenth president, from his own lifetime to the Hollywood biopics about him. Lincoln continues to survive in a body of memory that speaks volumes about our nation.

Stanley Kubrick Produces provides the first comprehensive account of Stanley Kubrick’s role as a producer, and of the role of the producers he worked with throughout his career. It considers how he first emerged as a producer, how he developed the role, and how he ultimately used it to fashion himself a powerbase by the 1970s. It goes on to consider how Kubrick’s centralizing of power became a self-defeating strategy by the 1980s and 1990s, one that led him to struggle to move projects out of development and into active production. Making use of overlooked archival sources and uncovering newly discovered ‘lost’ Kubrick projects (The Cop Killer, Shark Safari, and The Perfect Marriage among them), as well as providing the first detailed overview of the World Assembly of Youth film, James Fenwick provides a comprehensive account of Kubrick’s life and career and of how he managed to obtain the level of control that he possessed by the 1970s. Along the way, the book traces the rapid changes taking place in the American film industry in the post-studio era, uncovering new perspectives about the rise of young independent producers, the operations of influential companies such as Seven Arts and United Artists, and the whole field of film marketing.

This is the untold political history of television's formative era. The author, an historian, goes behind the scenes of early television programming, revealing that producers, sponsors, and scriptwriters had far more in mind than simply entertaining (and selling products). Long before the age of PBS, leaders from business, philanthropy, and social reform movements as well as public intellectuals were all obsessively concerned with TV's potential to mold the right kind of citizen. After World War II, inspired by the perceived threats of Soviet communism, class war, and racial violence, members of what was then known as "the Establishment" were drawn together by a shared conviction that television broadcasting could be a useful tool for governing. The men of Du Pont, the AFL-CIO, the Advertising Council, the Ford Foundation, the Fund for the Republic, and other organizations interested in shaping (according to American philosopher Mortimer Adler) "the ideas that should be in every citizen's mind," turned to TV as a tool for reaching those people they thought of as the masses. Based on years of archival work, this work sheds new light on the place of television in the postwar American political landscape. At a time when TV broadcasting is in a state of crisis, and when a new political movement for media reform has ascended the political stage, here is a new history of the ideas and assumptions that have profoundly shaped not only television, but our political culture itself.

By the 1920s, Abraham Lincoln had transcended the lingering controversies of the Civil War to become a secular saint, honored in North and South alike for his steadfast leadership in crisis. Throughout the Great Depression and World War II, Lincoln was invoked countless times as a reminder of America’s strength and wisdom, a commanding ideal against which weary citizens could see their own hardships in perspective. But as Barry Schwartz reveals in Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era, those years represent the apogee of Lincoln’s prestige. The decades following World War II brought radical changes to American culture, changes that led to the diminishing of all heroes—Lincoln not least among them. As Schwartz explains, growing sympathy for the plight of racial minorities, disenchantment with the American state, the lessening of patriotism in the wake of the Vietnam War, and an intensifying celebration of diversity, all contributed to a culture in which neither Lincoln nor any single person could be a heroic symbol for all Americans. Paradoxically, however, the very culture that made Lincoln an object of indifference, questioning, criticism, and even ridicule was a culture of unprecedented beneficence and inclusion, where racial, ethnic, and religious groups treated one another more fairly and justly than ever before. Thus, as the prestige of the Great Emancipator shrank, his legacy of equality continued to flourish. Drawing on a stunning range of sources—including films, cartoons, advertisements, surveys, shrine visitations, public commemorations, and more—Schwartz documents the decline of Lincoln’s public standing, asking throughout whether there is any path back from this post-heroic era. Can a new generation of Americans embrace again their epic past, including great leaders whom they know to be flawed? As the 2009 Lincoln Bicentennial approaches, readers will discover here a stirring reminder that Lincoln, as a man, still has much to say to us—about our past, our present, and our possible futures.