James Agee, Fort Sanders, and the Summer of Nineteen Fifteen
Near Knoxville, Tennessee
James Rufus Agee was born in Knoxville on November twenty-seventh, nineteen oh nine, in a house on Highland Avenue in the neighborhood that Civil War soldiers had called Fort Sanders. He spent his early childhood on Laurel Avenue, blocks from where the earthworks of the Confederate assault had been graded into residential lots. He was five years old in the summer of nineteen fifteen. His father, Hugh James Agee, was in his late thirties and drove them around the neighborhood at night in his car after supper, the family breathing the evening air through the open windows.
In nineteen sixteen, when James was six, his father went to visit an ailing grandfather and was killed in an automobile accident on the return. His death remade the family and remade the boy. Agee spent the rest of his life writing toward that moment without directly reaching it.
The book that became his masterwork, a novel called A Death in the Family, centers on a Knoxville family learning of a father's death in exactly those circumstances: the night drives through Fort Sanders, the phone call, the hours of waiting. Agee wrote toward the material for decades. He died in New York City in May of nineteen fifty-five, at forty-five, the manuscript unfinished.
His editor, David McDowell, assembled the existing material, and the novel was published in nineteen fifty-seven. The following year it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, one of three awarded posthumously in the prize's history to that point. The composer Samuel Barber set Agee's early prose-poem Knoxville: Summer of Nineteen Fifteen to music in nineteen forty-seven; it became one of the most performed American vocal works of the century.
The Fort Sanders neighborhood today is built over where James Agee played as a child. Some of the Victorian houses are still there. The earthworks are long gone. The summer evenings he described, the families on the porch, the hoses in the grass, the sleeping children carried inside, those were this neighborhood. This specific block, this ordinary light.
