Rufus: James Agee in Tennessee

One of the most gifted of America’s writers, James Rufus Agee (1909–1955), 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 Agee’s boyhood.

Brown meticulously delineates Agee’s family history, his earliest years as a sensitive child growing up in Kn...