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Duke University
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Durham, NC 27708
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The classic American novel, re-published for the 100th anniversary of James Agee's birth
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.
"[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