Published in 1957 to wide acclaim, James Agee's A Death in the Family was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature. However, the novel had been so heavily edited by publisher and editor David McDowell that it little resembled the manuscript that James Agee had completed at the time of his death. The inaugural title of the University of Tennessee Press's scholarly edition of The Works of James Agee, this restored text of A Death in the Family is, in many ways, a new novel.

This volume provides, for the first time, a modern critical edition of Agee's manuscript,...