What is the title of James Agee’s 1958 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel?
Answer
A Death in the Family
James Agee’s 1958 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is A Death in the Family.
Published posthumously in 1957, the novel draws heavily on Agee’s childhood experiences in Knoxville, Tennessee. Its central event is the death of Jay Follet in an automobile accident, after which his family struggles with grief and changing relationships.
The story is partly autobiographical: Agee’s own father, Hugh James Agee, died in a car accident when Agee was six. However, the novel is fiction rather than a straightforward memoir. Agee died in 1955, before the book’s publication, and editor David McDowell prepared the manuscript for print.
A Death in the Family won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958. It is sometimes confused with other Pulitzer-winning works about family life, including The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, but those novels won in different years and have different settings and themes.