KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- "A Death in the Family" won the Pulitzer Prize a half century ago and became an American literary classic, but it was not the book James Agee wrote.
"It wasn't what Agee intended. At least, it isn't the manuscript that he left when he died," University of Tennessee professor Michael Lofaro says.
More than two dozen chapters were eliminated, broken apart or rearranged in the posthumous editing of Agee's homage to his childhood in Knoxville in the early 1900s -- a story punctuated by his father's death in a car crash.
Now, in the first volume of a planned 10-volume set of Agee's collected works and letters, the University of Tennessee Press has published a more richly detailed and chronological narrative that may be truer to Agee's plan. The result could be a revelation to readers puzzled by the book's jumbled italicized flashbacks and incongruous prologue -- the poetic and previously published essay "Knoxville: Summer of 1915."
Under the original edits, Agee's father became less of an individual and more of a universal parent. And a succession of copy editors turned a deaf ear to Agee's keen sense of "East Tennessee" dialect. In one of hundreds of entries, "bran new" became "brand new," for example.
The result of several years' research by Lofaro, the new "A Death in the Family, A Restoration of the Author's Text" carries the approval of the Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Assn. and the support of the Agee family trust.
How different is the new book? Lofaro found 16 chapters to insert before the first chapter of the Pulitzer winner -- 144 pages in a revised edition of 356 pages.
"I don't think the current book would have been selected by the Book of the Month Club, which was part of its early penetration into people's consciousness," said Paul Sprecher, family trustee and husband to Agee's oldest daughter, Deedee Agee. "But I think it is a fuller story, a more honest story and I think it is more what Agee had in mind. It is less sentimental. It is a little wrenching."
Numerous classics have been reissued posthumously, in expanded forms, in recent years, including Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage" and Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie." Scholars have differed whether the new editions improved upon the original publications.
