Издания и произведения

Told with great lyrical beauty and power, James Agee's novel is an exquisitely tender account of the pain and bewilderment of loss. Driving back home to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1915 after tending to a family emergency, Jay Follet is killed in a car accident. He leaves behind a wife and two small children, who must come to terms with his absence as the days after his death slowly unfold. "A Death in the Family" interweaves the thoughts of Jay's loved ones - from his wife, Mary, struggling to cope and take comfort from her religion, to his six-year-old son, Rufus, bewildered by the mysteries of the adult world and clinging to fragile…

On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, who he believes is dying. The summons turns out to be a false alarm, but on his way back to his family, Jay has a car accident and is killed instantly. Dancing back and forth in time and braiding the viewpoints of Jay's wife, brother, and young son, Rufus, Agee creates an overwhelming powerful novel of innocence, tenderness, and loss that should be read for the sheer music of its prose.

James Agee. A Death in the Family. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, [1957]. First edition with the correct first issue points. Octavo. 339 pages. Publisher's binding, dust jacket. Winner of the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Agee was a poet, a penetrating film critic for TIME and other magazines, an intricate public conscience, and a man who carried all his life the burden of his father's death in a car accident when Agee was six. (Forty years later to the day Agee would die of a heart attack.) He brought all of that, both his gifts and his psychic injuries, to this grave and lyrical story of Rufus Follet, a boy whose world is…