A Death in the Family
by James Agee
Summary
Jay Follet takes a phone call in the middle of the night. His father may be dying, out in the Tennessee country, so he drives out, finds the old man in no danger at all, and on the road home a cotter pin fails, the car leaves the road, and a small blow to the chin kills him instantly.
Most of what follows belongs to his six year old son Rufus, who is old enough to register that something enormous has happened and too young to be told plainly what it is. He is sent out to play. He works out that he can hold the attention of older boys by telling them his father is dead. He waits with his younger sister in a house filling up with adults who keep lowering their voices.
Around him Agee sets Mary, the widow, holding to a faith her brother Andrew cannot stand and her father does not share, and two long night scenes in which nothing happens except that the family sits up, talks, drinks, and cannot say the thing.
The novel opens with Knoxville: Summer, 1915, a prose poem Agee had published on its own years earlier, and returns at intervals to italic passages from Rufus's earlier childhood.
The writing stays very close in, sentence by sentence, on ordinary physical detail: a lawn sprinkler, a streetcar, the smell of a man's clothes. That is where the grief is carried, rather than in any statement of it.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want a book that stays inside a single week in one house and refuses every consolation available to it.
Historical Context & Significance
A Death in the Family won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded posthumously. James Agee died of a heart attack in a New York taxi in May 1955, at forty five, leaving the novel unfinished.
His publisher David McDowell assembled the book that appeared in 1957, adding the Knoxville: Summer, 1915 prologue and setting the flashback material in italics, and stated in an editorial note that nothing had been rewritten. In 2007 Michael Lofaro published a reconstruction in The Collected Works of James Agee, arguing that McDowell had reordered events, divided and dropped chapters, cut Agee's forty four chapters to twenty, and replaced an opening nightmare with the prose poem.
Agee was better known in his lifetime as a film critic, as the author with Walker Evans of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and as a screenwriter on The African Queen. Tad Mosel's stage version, All the Way Home, won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and Samuel Barber had already set the Knoxville passage for soprano and orchestra in 1947.