Joel Agee

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Joel Agee (born 1940 in New York City) is an American writer and translator. He lives in New York.

Joel Agee is the son of the American author James Agee. After his parents divorced in 1941, he and his mother Alma Agee, née Mailman, went to live in Mexico where she met and married the expatriate German novelist Bodo Uhse. Agee's half-brother Stefan Uhse, born in Mexico in 1946, took his own life in 1973 in New York City. In 1948 the family moved to the Soviet sector of Berlin, where Uhse became editor in chief of the cultural magazine Aufbau, a member of the GDR-Volkskammer, and later chairman of the East German writers association. When her marriage failed in 1960, Alma Uhse relocated with her sons back to the United States.

Joel Agee grew up in a literary family, and at an early age was determined to become a writer. Having various times dropped out of school, he was to a certain degree self-educated. He married Susan Lemansky in 1966 and their daughter Gina was born in 1967. A small inheritance enabled him to travel around Europe for two and a half years with his wife and daughter in search of kindred souls interested in founding a commune. During this period, the late sixties and early seventies, he was drawn to Buddhism and experimented with drugs, notably LSD. Briefly, before returning to the US, he spent time in an English prison after being busted for possession. Many of these experiences are recounted in his memoir In the House of My Fear.

Joel Agee wrote the memoir Twelve Years – An American Boyhood in East Germany (1981), followed by In the House of My Fear (2004). He has translated works by Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Elias Canetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gottfried Benn, Hans Erich Nossack, Jürg Federspiel, Aeschylus and others. He has contributed essays, stories, travel pieces and book reviews to The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, and other national publications.

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