James Rufus Agee was born on November 27, 1909, in Knoxville, Tennessee. As a boy, he was always called by his middle name, the name given to the main character in A Death in the Family. When he was six, Agee's father died in an automobile accident. Agee was sent to boarding school in his childhood, then to Philips Exeter Academy, which was to become a strong influence throughout his life. He then went to Harvard University, where he received an associate's degree in 1932. He married the first of his three wives the following year and went to work at Fortune, one of the country's preeminent business magazines. Though Agee's left-leaning politics disagreed with the magazine's focus on finance, his work there gave him the opportunity to work on his poetry.

In 1936, Fortune sent Agee and photographer Walker Evans to Alabama to report on the lives of tenant...