Assessments of A Death in the Family at the time of its publication indicate that reviewers were not just out to honor the memory of a good writer who had died, but that they saw the qualities of the novel that have made it an American classic. Dwight MacDonald, writing in The New Yorker, noted that even though Agee died before final editing, the book "reads like a finished work—brilliant, moving, and written with an objectivity and a control he had not achieved before." Most reviews, like that written by Melvin Maddocks in The Christian Science Monitor, were generally pleased with the book while still recognizing its weaknesses. Examining how difficult it is to write convincingly from a child's perspective, Maddocks notes that "James Agee's posthumous novel is proof that the job can sometimes be managed accurately as well as fondly, vividly as well as...