James Rufus Agee (November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, screenwriter, journalist, poet, and film critic. In the 1940s he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.

Agee was born at 15th and Highland Streets in Knoxville, Tennessee. When Agee was six, his father died in an automobile accident, and from the age of seven he was sent to boarding schools, where he felt isolated from and abandoned by his mother. He attended St. Andrews-Sewanee School (then an Episcopal monastery run by the monks), and Phillips Exeter Academy, (class of 1928), where he edited the Monthly and was president of The Lantern Club (though barely passing many of his courses), before going on to Harvard University (class of 1932) where he was president of the Harvard Advocate and delivered the class ode at commencement.

After graduation, he wrote for Fortune and Time magazines. (He is better known, however, for his later film criticism in The Nation.) He married Via Saunders on January 28, 1933; they divorced in 1938 and that same year he married Alma Mailman. In 1934, he published his first volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage, with a foreword by Archibald MacLeish.

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