Rufus

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