James Rufus Agee’s A Death in the Family revolves around the death of a beloved father, Jay Follet, who in everyway was the perfect father and hero of his children. The story is not about death but about the emotional reaction to the death and about love, a topic that can be related to all with relative ease. Rufus, the main character, struggles throughout the novel to learn the true meaning of what has happened to his father and to mature. It is clear that James Agee’s life had an enormous impact on the writing of A Death in the Family.

A Death in the Family begins with Rufus and his father, Jay Follet, going to the movie theatre to see a Charlie Chaplin film. As always Rufus’ mother, Mary, objected to them going. She said that that little man was “vulgar” and “nasty” (Agee 11). After watching the movie they stopped on the way home at a local pub so Jay could get a drink. Later that night, after returning home, Jay gets a call from his drunken brother saying that he needs to come immediately to see his father who is in a fatal condition. Jay feels that his brother is most likely exaggerating the whole illness but never the less he should go to be su

It’s not hard to see that James Agee’s purpose behind writing A Death in the Family was due to an intense desire to know himself (Larsen 36). It captures his image of his own childhood as well as the difficulties all families are faced with during life (Kramer 155) and also confronts death as the negation of life, but at the same time recognizes it as a necessary part of life (Kramer 145).

It is easy to see that the writing of A Death in the Family is mainly autobiographical and that many things from Agee’s life influenced him and helped him write this novel. There are numerous amounts of people that urged Agee to write and were there by his side it times of hardship. There were a few writers that inspired Agee to write such as Walt Whitman and Hart Crane (Seib 23). Agee’s Elizabethan poem, Permit Me Voyage, received its title from Crane’s “Voyages III” (23). There are also many prevalent qualities that you could find in Crane’s works that are easy to find in many of Agee’s poems such as the constant theme of the ecstasy and omnipotence of love (23). Agee also showed a resemblance to that of Crane and Whitman in that he had a great affinity for cataloging and used weighty rhetoric that could arouse a prodigious amount of intensity and energy for the reader (24). Probably the most influential person in Agee’s life that affected his whole literary career would be Father Flye. Father Flye was a life long friend of Agee’s and not only that but he was a “spiritual adviser” as well (4). Documents of Agee’s letters to Flye show that he was able to share intimate feelings and thoughts with him. Among the people that had a influence on his writing his family contained a few people that had a great affect on his works. In A Death in the Family the parallel is easily recognized by family members, including himself. Just as Rufus in the story, James Agee’s father is killed in a car accident when he is only six. The death of his father was most likely the major reason for Agee’s writing of this book as well as reconstructing the setting of his childhood (Kramer 142). Another family member that can be paralleled from the book is Agee’s mother. Mary in the book is a devoutly religious woman and Agee’s mother in life was a religious woman, encouraging the enroll at religious schools such as St. Andrew’s.

Agee is by no means the greatest of all American Writers but he is definitely an undiscovered gem in the vast field of American writers. James Rufus Agee was born on November 27th, 1909 in Knoxville, Tennessee (Larsen 6). His mother, Laura Whitman Tyler, was well educated and refined (Kramer 19). His father, Hugh James Agee, was from a more rural environment and said to have had “a rugged sweetness, a tenderness, a fine chiseled handsomeness, and a rollicking

Some topics in this essay:
Catherine Joel, Charlie Chaplin, Death Family, James Agee’s, Praise Famous, Agee Harvard, Father Flye, James Agee, Jay Follet, Hannah Mary, death family, james agee’s, agee’s life, mary tells, writing death, writing death family, agee’s mother, father flye, mary tells children, editor magazine, father’s funeral, mother mary, james agee’s life, father jay follet,