"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 eldest 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. Agee, the pioneering film critic, screenwriter ("The African Queen"), poet and journalist ("Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"), died at 45 of a heart attack in a New York City cab in 1955. His greatest fame came after his death, beginning with the publication of his untitled story of his early life. He had worked on the novel for years. It was nearly done, written in pencil in tiny cursive strokes on stacks of unnumbered, yellowed pages. Friend and editor David McDowell, who was searching for income for Agee's widow, Mia, and three children, cobbled together and published the book as "A Death in the Family" in 1957 to critical raves and popular appeal. It won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1958, won a second Pulitzer in 1961 for Tad Mosel's adapted play "All the Way Home" and was turned into at least three major TV productions, including a PBS "Masterpiece Theatre" presentation in 2002. But McDowell left a different story - maybe even a better one - on his editing desk. The first hint came in 1988 when McDowell's son sold a box of his father's papers to the university. "I went over and looked at the stuff, and there were two substantial chapters in Agee's hand that nobody had seen before," Lofaro said. "And I went, hmmmm ..." (Those two chapters were published by Harper's magazine in December. They were the only chapters Agee titled. One is called "Enter the Ford," referring to his father's car. The other is "Chilhowee Park," a real park in Knoxville). The find began Lofaro's long search for Agee's original vision, as lawsuits over ownership of the papers loitered in the courts, finally resolved by Sprecher's appointment as Agee trustee in 2002.
Lofaro acknowledges being motivated by McDowell's claim in an editors' note that still appears at the front of every copy of "A Death in the Family" that Agee's book "is presented here exactly as he wrote it." The evidence in the Agee archives at the University of Texas in Austin, the trove at Tennessee and materials still with the Agee trust suggests otherwise. Lofaro found drafts, revisions, outlines and letters in which Agee described how the book should flow and what it should contain.
"It was patently clear he had jiggered it," Lofaro said of McDowell, though the effort was "done with the right intentions" to make money for the family, expose the world to Agee's masterpiece and "to keep the memory and legend of James Agee on a certain track." A key change was a new introduction. Instead of McDowell's use of the bucolic "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," Agee had written a surreal nightmare in which the author finds himself as an adult back in Knoxville carrying the dead body of his father. There are images here that resonate through the rest of the book. The other was a clear desire to tell the story in sequence. McDowell cut several chapters of Agee's earliest memories, then fashioned bits and pieces of them into two flashback chapters - an aesthetic device Lofaro believes would have been popular at the time. Yet Agee apparently planned a more straightforward approach. In a letter to his mother, Agee wrote simply: "I am trying to write a short book, a novel, beginning with the first things I can remember, and ending with my father's funeral."
Lofaro said the revised edition achieves that, then adds more than 200 pages of scholarly notes and background. The Agee trust is considering an edition for general readers as well. Whether Agee would be satisfied is hard to say. "I think he probably would have still been tinkering with it had he lived," Lofaro said.