Published in 1957, two years after its author's death at the age of forty-five, A Death in the Family remains a near-perfect work of art, an autobiographical novel that contains one of the most evocative depictions of loss and grief ever written. As Jay Follet hurries back to his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, he is killed in a car accident - a tragedy that destroys not only a life, but also the domestic happiness and contentment of a young family. A novel of great courage, lyric force, and powerful emotion, A Death in the Family is a masterpiece of American literature.

a The work of a writer whose power with English words can make you gasp.a
aAlfred Kazin, The New York Times Book Review
a It is, in the full sense, poetry. . . . The language of the book, at once luminous and discreet . . . remains in the mind.a
a The New Republic
a Brilliant, moving, and written with . . . objectivity and control. . . . It is wonderfully alive.a
a The New Yorker
[James Agee's words] are so indelibly etched someplace inside of me that I couldn't reach to rub them out even if I wanted to. And I never want to.
-Steve Earle, from the Introduction

The work of a writer whose power with English words can make you gasp.
-Alfred Kazin, The 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.
- The New Republic

Wonderfully alive.
- The New Yorker

James Agee was born in Tennesse in 1909 and graduated from Harvard University. His renowned study of Alabama sharecroppers during the Depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, appeared in 1941. Agee was known for his movie reviews and screenplays, and published a volume of poetry and a novella. He died in 1955, two years before his major work of fiction, A Death in the Family, was published and won the Pulitzer Prize.