James Agee (1909–1955)

“On the rough cut grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there….The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds.” -Page 7

James Agee's posthumously awarded Pulitzer Prize winning novel is thought to be based on his show more own life (his middle name is Rufus, just like the son in the story). Set in Knoxville, Tennessee in the summer of 1915, Rufus is enjoying all that is right with the world. A loving father that takes him to the movies and allows him other indulgences that his mother wouldn't approve of, a great aunt who dotes on him and purchases for him the cap he fancies and an extended family that showers him with love. His biggest worry involves the boys who pick on him on his way to school. And then the unthinkable happens: his loving father Jay is killed suddenly in a car accident, returning from his parents’ house, several hundred miles away. His drunken brother called him in the middle of the night suggesting that their father was near death, which proved to be untrue and there lies the irony in this story.

The story is told mainly through the viewpoints of Jay’s wife Mary, brother Ralph and young son, Rufus. The magnificence of this book is its’ lyrical prose (the entire prologue reads as a poem). I found myself rereading parts of the book over and over again because of the beautiful sound of the verses. The story is, of course, morbidly sad, and, in the hands of a less skilled writer, would have been very distasteful. But Agee is terrific at making you empathize with these characters. After receiving the initial news about “a serious accident,” Mary and her Great Aunt Hannah, await the return of Mary’s brother, Andrew with news of Jay’s injuries and when he returns those three and Mary’s parents speak for hours about the tragedy. The author made me feel as if I was in the room with them because the give and take of their conversation was so well done.

Agee’s treatment of Catholic religion suggests that he had a bad experience with it in his own life. Although Mary and Hannah are very religious and fall back on their faith to get them through this tough time, the author is hard on the Catholic faith with the inclusion of the rigid and hard-nosed Father Jackson, and revealing that Andrew and Joel, Mary’s father, have little faith.

I love the way Agee made the story a refreshing one rather than the maudlin tale it could have turned into, by revealing that Jay was a flawed character, whom other characters had to warm up to. It would’ve been so easy for the author to fall into the trap of creating a character that was bigger than life.

My favorite character was Rufus. I loved the way his mind worked and how he analyzed all the difficulties he faced and presented them through his child-like innocence. In the prologue, Agee says, “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.” Rufus grew up in a hurry that summer. Highly recommended. show less

James Agee’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Death in the Family captured the initial moments of grief with beautiful clarity. The shock, anger and sadness that inflicted each character was so realistically drawn, it was near flawless. Won posthumously in 1957, the edition of A Death in the Family that I read contained only minor changes to Agee’s writing, plus two sections that were not placed formally into the story by the author. To think that Agee wrote this masterpiece without the show more benefit of an editor shows you the caliber of his writing. Like his character development, this story was close to perfect.

Jay Follett was a husband and father with a slightly mysterious past, who was called to his father’s bedside in the middle of the night. On his trip home, his car experienced mechanical failure, resulting in Jay’s instantaneous death. He left behind his wife, Mary and his two children, Rufus and Catherine.

The mysterious aspects of Jay’s life enthralled me. You get the impression that he was an alcoholic – perhaps on the wagon at the time of his death – who pulled himself out of nothing into a productive life. As Mary’s family learned of Jay’s death, you discovered they were not supportive of Mary and Jay’s marriage initially, but as time evolved, they grew to love him. Without a doubt, he held a tight bond with his son, Rufus. For most of the book, you witnessed the emotional roller coaster that the family experiences as they deal with Jay’s death. From wanting to know the details of the accident to trying to sleep and eat, death and daily living were juxtaposed for the readers to consider: How would you deal with the sudden death of a loved one?

The book ends on the day of the funeral, leaving you curious about how the family would cope so early in their grief. How would Mary survive without her husband’s financial support? How would the children learn to live without their father? Agee leaves many questions unanswered, but made one thing clear: grief is a force to be reckoned with. It ebbs and flows throughout a person’s lifetime; always there – sometimes in the distance, sometimes very close. A Death in the Family was a wonderful tribute to this raw human emotion. show less

Honestly? One of the greatest, most poetic & rage-filled books I've ever read. It grabbed me by the throat from the beginning and rarely let go.

I want to see ALL Walker Evans' photographs.

I suppose there are aspects of this that are ... problematic by today's standards. I wound up not caring, because ... well ...

... god DAMN. This BOOK. The main problem with a book like this is that it makes most other books look like piffle.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is James Agee's and Walker Evans' famous book about white sharecroppers* in Hale County, Alabama during the Great Depression. It was the outgrowth of a report they did for Fortune magazine, a report which was not published, for reasons that are not certain, and that had long been thought lost. This is that report. It is blunt and unsparing. It is an indictment of the agricultural, social and political systems of the South that kept hard-working people living in show more appalling conditions, poorly nourished, undereducated, and eternally in debt to those whose land they tilled.

This is a straight-forward telling. It is not prettified or fictionalized. In this report, unlike their book, the families are given their true names. The descriptions of their daily lives, the rhythm of their months and years, the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the work they do, are terse, almost list-like, but all the more compelling for that.

Yet Agee's words still astonish. Read his description of the cotton fields ready for picking, look how he juxtaposes an image of light with an image of ugliness : "Late in August the fields begin to whiten more rarely with late blooms and more frequently with cotton and then still thicker with cotton, like a sparkling ground starlight; and the wide tremendous light holds the earth beneath a glass vacuum and a burning glass. The bolls are rusty green, are bronze, are split and burst and splayed open in a loose vomit of cotton . . . There is a great deal of beauty about a single burr and the cotton slobbering from it and about a whole field opening." The same is true of Evans' photographs. These faces lined with hardship, with work and starvation, still have in them a delicacy, a reflection of all that is human. Look at the photos of Floyd Burroughs and his wife, Allie May, look at their eyes. There is a sadness in his, a worn-out-ness, while hers still have a hint of the beauty she must once have been, a hint of humor, too.

We mustn't read this as history, though it was written more than 70 years ago. Things have improved, no doubt, for people like the Burroughs and the Fields and the Tingles. But our cities could use a team like Agee & Evans to document the social and economic injustices that have not been eradicated, but seem only to have become urban rather than rural. I call this "uncomfortable reading" because, if we are honest, we know that we cannot say "that's over and done with", and we must confront the failures of our current age.

* a note on this. Agee & Evans deliberately chose to focus on white families, because, as Agee says, "Any honest consideration of the Negro would crosslight and distort the issue with the problems not of a tenant but of a race . . ." show less