James Agee's A Death in the Family is a posthumous novel based on the largely complete manuscript that the author left upon his death in 1955. Agee had been working on the novel for many years, and portions of the work had already appeared in The Partisan Review, The Cambridge Review, The New Yorker, and Harper's Bazaar.
Published in 1957, the novel was edited by David McDowell. Several lengthy passages, part of Agee's manuscript whose position in the chronology was not identified by the author, were placed in italics by the editor, whose decision it was to place them at the conclusion of Parts I and II. These dream-like sequences suggest the influence of James Joyce, especially of Ulysses, on Agee's writing.
It was also McDowell's decision to add the brief prefatory section, “Knoxville: Summer, 1915,” Agee's poetic meditation on his southern childhood. As an overture to the novel, this evocative section, although not part of Agee's original manuscript, is extremely effective,......
Join Now or Login to view the rest of this paper.
Approximate Word Count: 2013
Approximate Pages: 8 (260 words per double-spaced page) |