Abstract
While the screenplays for "The African Queen" and "The Night of the Hunter," the strikingly uncategorizable Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family, provide the most frequent points of connection between James Agee (1909-1955) and an appreciative audience, these works (ironically, even the last) tend to obscure the full effect of his boyhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, and his Appalachian mountain heritage upon his writing. A wider reading of his work reveals that over the course of his career Agee presents an Appalachian pastoral along an axis of conflict that ranges from an idealized agrarian past beset with the harsh realities of mountain life to artificially created pastoral moments in which desire and imagination contend with growing industrialization. These efforts to negotiate an Appalachian pastoral receive their most sustained treatment in the newly restored manuscript edition of A Death in the Family, a significantly different version of the novel than that published posthumously in 1957. This "new" novel captures the full sense of the complications that mark Knoxville and Appalachia as zones in transition, but also are, in Agee’s final judgment, places where at least partial transcendence is still possible.
