A Death in the Family

author
James Agee

the spiel
What I want to do is simply write "Brilliant!" over and over again, filling page after page with this one word reverie. I will restrain myself, but only because I am reasonably certain this would convince virtually no one to read this book. Here's the blurb from the back of the book so you have some idea what I'm talking about:
Forty years after its original publication, James Agee's last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man's death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.
On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom 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 overwhelmingly powerful novel of innocence, tenderness, and loss that should be read aloud for the sheer music of its prose.

Agee's prose throb with stunning, lyrical, power. His chorus of hopeful voices resound with poetic tenderness, gentle humor, and terrifying base feeling. His novel literally contains multitudes, and you are peeling layer upon layer of his characters live's back as you read. Agee moves effortlessly along the spectrum between prose and poetry, endowing his reader with a form that is more like an expression of human feeling than any literary genre.

I only read A Death in the Family when I'm by myself, in a quiet place, because the experience of reading this book is so intensely intimate, emotional, and profound; I find that it takes all of my focus, and absorbs all of my senses. And despite the fact that I won't read this book at work, or at a coffee shop, while I'm reading it I carry it with me everywhere just to have it. I am repeatedly moved to tears by the heartbreaking beauty of the writing (and am indeed teary-eyed now, trying to write this). It is impossible not to be moved by this book: I know more people who call A Death in the Family one of the most influential books of their lives than any other book (myself included); your life will be fuller for having read it.

how the book begins
"We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child."

the hype
"An utterly individual and original book...one of the most deeply worked out expressions of human feeling that I have ever read."
—Alfred Kazin, New York Times Book Review

"It is, in the full sense, poetry....The language of the book, at once luminous and discreet...remains in the mind."
—New Republic

"People I know who read A Death in the Family forty years ago still talk about it. So do I. It is a great book, and I'm happy to see it done anew."
—Andre Dubus

"Maturely and masterfully, Agee accomplished a book which touches one deeply and which no reader will forget."
—New York Herald Tribune Book Review

"Brilliant, moving, and written with...objectivity and control...It is wonderfully alive."
—The New Yorker

sigh
This book has been reissued with a stupid cover. It will not be shown on this website (Do not go gentle into that good night!).

some other things this author has written
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
The Morning Watch
Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes
Collected Poems of James Agee
Selected Journalism
Agee on Film