Putting it together again

• James Agee's A Death in the Family is getting a new restoration.

More than two dozen chapters were eliminated, broken apart or rearranged in the posthumous editing of Agee's homage to his childhood in Knoxville in the early 1900s — a story punctuated by his father's death in a car crash.

Now, in the first volume of a planned 10-volume set of Agee's collected works and letters, the University of Tennessee Press has published a more richly detailed and chronological narrative that may be truer to Agee's plan. The result could be a revelation to readers puzzled by the book's jumbled italicized flashbacks and incongruous prologue — the poetic and previously published essay "Knoxville: Summer of 1915."

Under the original edits, Agee's father became less of an individual and more of a universal parent. And a succession of copy editors turned a deaf ear to Agee's keen sense of "East Tennessee" dialect. In one of hundreds of entries, "bran new" became "brand new," for example.