"Exciting, fully documented biography of a national hero."--New York Times. "An authoritative biography of one of the most romantic figures of our history, and a contribution to the story of the settlement of the first trans-Appalachian West."--Henry Steele Commager, New York Herald Tribune. "An engrossing and illuminating book. . . . It is unlikely that future writers will find much to add to the record here given."--Allan Nevins, Saturday Review of Literature. "Too much credit can hardly be given the author for the careful, painstaking, and scholarly way in which lie has sought out,...

Davy Crockett has been America's best-known folk hero for at least 160 years. This informed biography by James Atkins Shackford first appeared in 1956, at the height of the television-inspired Crockett craze. As Michael Lofaro notes in his introduction, "Shackford faced the monumental task of rescuing a nearly unknown David Crockett from the obscurity caused by the popularity of the earlier legendary Davys and deepened by Disney." He succeeded memorably, restoring David Crockett of Tennessee, a true pioneer and colorful figure even without romantic trappings.

The embodiment of the American hero, Daniel Boone personifies the great adventure of his age - the westward movement of the American people. The prototype for the frontiersman, he was a multifaceted individual who shaped and was driven by the complex forces of this dynamic period in history. Daniel Boone: An American Life brings together over thirty years of research in this extraordinary biography. Based on primary sources, the book depicts Boone through the eyes of those who knew him and within the historical contexts of his eighty-six years. Boone's story offers new insights into the...

Novelist, journalist, film critic, poet, and activist James Agee (1909?1955) produced an impressive array of literary works spanning three decades. His poems, novels, essays, works of criticism, and screenplays gave profound social insights into the Depression-ridden 1930s and war-torn 1940s, and scholars study and debate his work to this day. Agee, a Tennessee native, is arguably the most important literary figure from the state.James Agee Rediscovered, edited by Michael A. Lofaro and Hugh Davis, gives a newand unique perspective on this prolific writer. With this book, the editors have...

Most widely noted for his acclaimed Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family, Tennessee native James Agee was also a journalist, film critic, poet, and screenwriter. More than fifty years after Agee's untimely death, his canon of work continues to grow in popularity, and his ability to capture the human condition in all its forms remains unparalleled.
Agee Agonistes is a compilation of seventeen essays from the James Agee Celebration hosted by the University of Tennessee in April 2005. The collection includes some of the best interpretations...

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,...