It’s difficult to overestimate the impact of the many new works by James Agee uncovered and published in the last twenty years. These previously unknown primary works have, in turn, encouraged a parallel explosion of critical evaluation and reevaluation by scholars, to which James Agee in Context is the latest contribution.

This superb collection from well-known James Agee scholars features myriad approaches and contexts for understanding the author’s fiction, poetry, journalism, and screenwriting. The essays bring the reader from the streets of James Agee’s New York to travel with the author from Alabama to Hollywood to Havana. Contributors explore overlapping and sometimes unique subjects, themes, and accomplishments (or lack thereof) in Agee’s uncovered works and highlight the diversity of interest that Agee’s complete body of work inspires. The insightful scholarship on influence examines connections between Agee and Wright Morris, Helen Levitt, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Stephen Crane. Such juxtapositions serve to illustrate how Agee drew on literary influences as a young man, how he used his work as a journalist to craft fiction as he was about to turn thirty, and his influence upon others. The volume concludes with three poems and a short story by Agee, all previously unknown.

It seems astonishing that so much remains to be discovered about this protean author, his materials, and his circle. Yet, the recovery and analysis of neglected texts and information mined from newspapers and magazines proves the extent to which Agee kept his mind and his work, as he himself put it, “patiently concentrated upon the essential quietudes of the human soul.”

One of the most gifted of America’s writers, James Rufus Agee (1909–1955), spent a third of his short life in Tennessee, yet no biographical treatment until this one has so fully explored his roots in the state. In Rufus, Paul F. Brown draws deeply on a trove of journals, letters, interviews, and contemporaneous newspaper accounts, to produce a captivating portrait of Agee’s boyhood.

Brown meticulously delineates Agee’s family history, his earliest years as a sensitive child growing up in Knoxville’s Fort Sanders neighborhood, and the traumatic event that marked his sixth year: his father’s death in an automobile accident. Young Rufus—as his family always called him—revered his father and would use his memories of the tragedy to create his most enduring work of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Death in the Family. Just a few years after his father was killed, Agee’s mother placed him in the St. Andrew’s School for Mountain Boys near Sewanee, Tennessee, where he would meet his mentor and lifelong friend, Father James Flye; these experiences would inspire Agee’s poignant novella, The Morning Watch. Another year in Knoxville followed, and then his mother, newly remarried, whisked him away to New England, where he would complete his education at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard.

Brown’s account deftly reconstructs various settings the young Agee encountered—including not only turn-of-the-century Knoxville and St. Andrew’s but also the mountain hamlet of LaFollette, his father’s hometown—and the complex family relationships that swirled around the young writer-to-be. Brown also explores Knoxville’s belated discovery of its famous son, initiated when Hollywood came to town in 1962 to film All the Way Home, an adaptation of A Death in the Family. Notable commemorations—including academic seminars, a public park, and a street named in Agee’s honor—would come later as the writer’s posthumous reputation bloomed. And now, with Rufus, we have the definitive account of how it all began.