Agee's only other novel, The Morning Watch (1950), is about a boy at a boarding school in the mountains of Tennessee who has a religious reaction to the natural world that surrounds him.

Agee was sent away to school at age nine to St. Andrew's, a small Episcopalian school. While there, he began a lifelong relationship with Father James Harold Flye. Agee's correspondences with Flye over the next thirty years, concerning his innermost considerations of moral and spiritual matters, his thoughts on art and alcoholism, and the trials of living, are collected in Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (1962).

A Death in the Family is concerned with the process of coping with death, which is the subject of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's groundbreaking psychology text On Death and Dying (1969). Kubler-Ross was the person who first charted the five stages of grief: denial...