James Agee

Call it the gospel of hard times. With all this bad economic news, we're starting to hear a chorus of voices preaching the cultural benefits of financial crises. Surely it has reached your ears: A recession could force us to spend more time with our...

ASK ALMOST anyone to name a female author who has a successful string of novels about vampires, and, chances are, he or she will quickly say Stephenie Meyer, whose "Twilight" series is sweeping across bestseller lists. Five years ago, however, the first...

The poet Weldon Kees was born in Beatrice, Neb., in 1914, though what's best known about him is that on July 18, 1955, his car was found abandoned with the keys still in the ignition in a parking lot on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge....

Dorothea Lange's photograph "Migrant Mother" (1936), which shows a plaintive, destitute woman surrounded by her children at the height of the Depression, secured her place as one of the most distinguished documentary photographers of all time. That...

By Richard Rayner "Ulysses" (Vintage: $17 paper) is the description of a single day, June 16, 1904, a day in the mingled lives of characters walking, talking, dreaming, eating, drinking, mourning and climaxing their way through the hours of an average...

Edward Anderson had a strange and sad career. He was born in Texas in 1905 and grew up in Oklahoma, serving his apprenticeship as a journalist on a small paper in Ardmore, Okla. Restless, he worked as a deckhand on a freighter, plied his fists as a...

THE OTHER night, while channel surfing, I happened upon the famous final scene from John Ford's classic film, "The Grapes of Wrath." Hearing Henry Fonda's inspirational words about always being present, if only in spirit, whenever injustice was...

Critic's Picks A Chorus Line, opening Oct. 5 at the Schoenfeld Theatre. All together now: "five, six, seven, eight!" The Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning monument to Broadway gypsy dancers is back where its fans believe it has always belonged....

What do you think of the WGA list? ++++++++++++++++++++ || 1. || CASABLANCA Screenplay by Julius J. & Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch. Based on the play "Everybody Comes to Rick's" by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison || || 2. || THE GODFATHER...

Although bars and restaurants choke it on all sides, Griffin Theatre, the long-established storefront in the commercial heart of Andersonville, is one of Chicago's archetypal neighborhood theaters. The passion and dedication exceed the financial resources...

SERGEANT YORK (Howard Hawks; 1941) 4 stars Based on the incredible true story of World War I hero Sergeant York, a religious pacifist and sharpshooter who temporarily abandoned his beliefs to save his company, this powerful biographical drama was the...

3½ stars (out of 4) David Gordon Green's "Undertow"--which stars Jamie Bell and Josh Lucas as a fugitive boy and his devilish uncle--is a contemporary Southern Gothic movie thriller, true to its roots but also true to our time. Easily, violently, Green's...