Rufus

One of the most gifted of Americas writers, James Rufus Agee (19091955), 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 Agees boyhood. Brown meticulously delineates Agees family history, his earliest years as a sensitive child growing up in Knoxvilles Fort Sanders neighborhood, and the traumatic event that marked his sixth year: his fathers death in an automobile accident. Young Rufusas his family always called himrevered his father and would use his memories of the tragedy to create his most enduring work of fiction, the Pulitzer Prizewinning A Death in the Family. Just a few years after his father was killed, Agees mother placed him in the St. Andrews School for Mountain Boys near Sewanee, Tennessee, where he would meet his mentor and lifelong friend, Father James Flye; these experiences would inspire Agees 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. Browns account deftly reconstructs various settings the young Agee encounteredincluding not only turn-of-the-century Knoxville and St. Andrews but also the mountain hamlet of LaFollette, his fathers hometownand the complex family relationships that swirled around the young writer-to-be. Brown also explores Knoxvilles 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 commemorationsincluding academic seminars, a public park, and a street named in Agees honorwould come later as the writers posthumous reputation bloomed. And now, with Rufus, we have the definitive account of how it all began.