Dr. Michael A. Lofaro Presented with the College of Arts and Sciences' "Senior Research and Creative Achievement Award in the Arts and Humanities"
The award carries with it three years of supplemental funding to support Professor Lofaro's work on James Agee, both his new edition of A Death in the Family and his work as the general editor of The Works of James Agee (10 volumes, University of Tennessee Press). Professor Lofaro's James Agee's A Death in the Family: The Restoration of the Author's Text will serve as the first volume of The Works and will restore eight and one-half mistakenly deleted chapters, replace the draft versions of four and one-half other chapters with Agee's final versions, and restore the chronological order of the novel in accord with Agee's finished manuscript that was altered for publication after his death by editors with the claim that the work "is presented here exactly as he wrote it. There has been no re-writing, and nothing has been eliminated except for a few cases of first-draft material which he later reworked at greater length…." Agee's original novel may well be a far stronger one than that of his editors that won the Pulitzer Prize. Dr. Lofaro's volume is scheduled for publication in late 2007, the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Agee's novel.