A Death in the Family

Common card · No. 401515

A Death in the Family is an autobiographical novel by James Agee. It was based on events from 1915, when Agee's father drove out of town to visit his own father who had suffered a heart attack. During the return trip, Agee's father was killed in a car accident. The novel focuses on the immediate aftermath of the accident, and how the family members cope with the tragedy. Although Agee had been working on the novel for many years, it was not complete when he died unexpectedly in May 1955. David McDowell of the McDowell, Obolensky publishing firm made various editorial decisions as to how to organize the manuscript into a finished form. The resulting novel was released in November 1957, winning Agee a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Decades later, Professor Michael Lofaro of the University of Tennessee challenged the editorial choices that McDowell had made, and published an alternative version of A Death in the Family in 2007.

Read on Wikipedia