James Agee 's literary work -- poetry, journalism, criticism, screenplays -- was not that of just a fiction writer. According to Father James Harold Flye, Agee's mentor, teacher, and surrogate father, Agee frequently talked of extending his unfinished autobiographical project, A Death in the Family (1957), into a Proustian novel that could never have reached completion. Agee's autobiographical remembrances summoned flights of the imagination. Throughout his literary career he remained fascinated with developing methods of observing, documenting, and appreciating the ordinary by means of his writing. Agee's storytelling for films, as well as his fictional works, reveals that he constantly sought to extend the range of what fiction accomplishes.

The details of Agee's birth in 1909 in Knoxville, Tennessee; his childhood; and the early loss of his father in May 1916 in an automobile accident became the basis of A Death in the Family. His subsequent education -- at Saint Andrew's...