The opposite in basically every way possible of the previous three books, A Death in the Family is intimate, emotional, and profound. Jay is called away from his family late one night to tend to his ill father and then is killed in a car crash en route. Agee calls forth a chorus of hopeful voices that resound with poetic tenderness, gentle humor, and terrifyingly raw emotion. Agee moves effortlessly along the spectrum between prose and poetry, endowing his reader with a form that is more like an expression of human feeling than any literary genre. It is impossible not to be moved by this book: I know more people (myself included) who cite "A Death in the Family" as one of the most influential books of their lives more often than any other.
