Restoring James Agee: a Textual Analysis of the Original and Restored Versions of James Agee\u27s a Death in the Family

James Agee\u27s A Death in the Family, the semiautobiographical book chronicling the death of a young boy\u27s father in 1916, was published postumously in 1957, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Literature the following year. The book was nearly complete at the time of the author\u27s death in 1955, and for nearly half a century editor David McDowell\u27s version of the book was the accepted one. Throughout the intervening years, critics took note of the myriad shortcomings of this edition. Mcdowell\u27s edition utilizes a previously published sketch, Knoxville: Summer 1915, as the prologue and presents events out of sequence in a truncated form reliant upon earlier versions of the manuscript. Written clues left by Agee clearly indicate this is not what he intended, and in 2007, Michael A. Lofaro, after several years of extensive effort, published the expanded and chronologically ordered version of A Death in the Family utilizing a piece entitled Dream Sequence as its prologue. This version of the text is much more in line with Agee\u27s desires for his book and remedies issues of cohesion and thematic/character development problematic in the earlier text. A Death in the Family is the culmination of James Agee\u27s writings, much of which dealt with the death of his father, and although subjective in nature, is the most effective in assisting Agee in coming to terms with his loss and providing a lasting memorial to his fathe

Restoring James Agee: a Textual Analysis of the Original and Restored Versions of James Agee\u27s a Death in the Family

James Agee\u27s A Death in the Family, the semiautobiographical book chronicling the death of a young boy\u27s father in 1916, was published postumously in 1957, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Literature the following year. The book was nearly complete at the time of the author\u27s death in 1955, and for nearly half a century editor David McDowell\u27s version of the book was the accepted one. Throughout the intervening years, critics took note of the myriad shortcomings of this edition. Mcdowell\u27s edition utilizes a previously published sketch, Knoxville: Summer 1915, as the prologue and presents events out of sequence in a truncated form reliant upon earlier versions of the manuscript. Written clues left by Agee clearly indicate this is not what he intended, and in 2007, Michael A. Lofaro, after several years of extensive effort, published the expanded and chronologically ordered version of A Death in the Family utilizing a piece entitled Dream Sequence as its prologue. This version of the text is much more in line with Agee\u27s desires for his book and remedies issues of cohesion and thematic/character development problematic in the earlier text. A Death in the Family is the culmination of James Agee\u27s writings, much of which dealt with the death of his father, and although subjective in nature, is the most effective in assisting Agee in coming to terms with his loss and providing a lasting memorial to his fathe

Restoring James Agee: a Textual Analysis of the Original and Restored Versions of James Agee\u27s a Death in the Family

James Agee\u27s A Death in the Family, the semiautobiographical book chronicling the death of a young boy\u27s father in 1916, was published postumously in 1957, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Literature the following year. The book was nearly complete at the time of the author\u27s death in 1955, and for nearly half a century editor David McDowell\u27s version of the book was the accepted one. Throughout the intervening years, critics took note of the myriad shortcomings of this edition. Mcdowell\u27s edition utilizes a previously published sketch, Knoxville: Summer 1915, as the prologue and presents events out of sequence in a truncated form reliant upon earlier versions of the manuscript. Written clues left by Agee clearly indicate this is not what he intended, and in 2007, Michael A. Lofaro, after several years of extensive effort, published the expanded and chronologically ordered version of A Death in the Family utilizing a piece entitled Dream Sequence as its prologue. This version of the text is much more in line with Agee\u27s desires for his book and remedies issues of cohesion and thematic/character development problematic in the earlier text. A Death in the Family is the culmination of James Agee\u27s writings, much of which dealt with the death of his father, and although subjective in nature, is the most effective in assisting Agee in coming to terms with his loss and providing a lasting memorial to his fathe

Reduced fire severity offers near-term buffer to climate-driven declines in conifer resilience across the western United States

Increasing fire severity and warmer, drier postfire conditions are making forests in the western United States (West) vulnerable to ecological transformation. Yet, the relative importance of and interactions between these drivers of forest change remain unresolved, particularly over upcoming decades. Here, we assess how the interactive impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity influenced conifer regeneration after 334 wildfires, using a dataset of postfire conifer regeneration from 10,230 field plots. Our findings highlight declining regeneration capacity across the West over the past four decades for the eight dominant conifer species studied. Postfire regeneration is sensitive to high-severity fire, which limits seed availability, and postfire climate, which influences seedling establishment. In the near-term, projected differences in recruitment probability between low- and high-severity fire scenarios were larger than projected climate change impacts for most species, suggesting that reductions in fire severity, and resultant impacts on seed availability, could partially offset expected climate-driven declines in postfire regeneration. Across 40 to 42% of the study area, we project postfire conifer regeneration to be likely following low-severity but not high-severity fire under future climate scenarios (2031 to 2050). However, increasingly warm, dry climate conditions are projected to eventually outweigh the influence of fire severity and seed availability. The percent of the study area considered unlikely to experience conifer regeneration, regardless of fire severity, increased from 5% in 1981 to 2000 to 26 to 31% by mid-century, highlighting a limited time window over which management actions that reduce fire severity may effectively support postfire conifer regeneration. © 2023 the Author(s)

The North American tree-ring fire-scar network

Fire regimes in North American forests are diverse and modern fire records are often too short to capture important patterns, trends, feedbacks, and drivers of variability. Tree-ring fire scars provide valuable perspectives on fire regimes, including centuries-long records of fire year, season, frequency, severity, and size. Here, we introduce the newly compiled North American tree-ring fire-scar network (NAFSN), which contains 2562 sites, >37,000 fire-scarred trees, and covers large parts of North America. We investigate the NAFSN in terms of geography, sample depth, vegetation, topography, climate, and human land use. Fire scars are found in most ecoregions, from boreal forests in northern Alaska and Canada to subtropical forests in southern Florida and Mexico. The network includes 91 tree species, but is dominated by gymnosperms in the genus Pinus. Fire scars are found from sea level to >4000-m elevation and across a range of topographic settings that vary by ecoregion. Multiple regions are densely sampled (e.g., >1000 fire-scarred trees), enabling new spatial analyses such as reconstructions of area burned. To demonstrate the potential of the network, we compared the climate space of the NAFSN to those of modern fires and forests; the NAFSN spans a climate space largely representative of the forested areas in North America, with notable gaps in warmer tropical climates. Modern fires are burning in similar climate spaces as historical fires, but disproportionately in warmer regions compared to the historical record, possibly related to under-sampling of warm subtropical forests or supporting observations of changing fire regimes. The historical influence of Indigenous and non-Indigenous human land use on fire regimes varies in space and time. A 20th century fire deficit associated with human activities is evident in many regions, yet fire regimes characterized by frequent surface fires are still active in some areas (e.g., Mexico and the southeastern United States). These analyses provide a foundation and framework for future studies using the hundreds of thousands of annually- to sub-annually-resolved tree-ring records of fire spanning centuries, which will further advance our understanding of the interactions among fire, climate, topography, vegetation, and humans across North America

Simulated nuclear contamination scenario, solid cancer risk assessment, and support to decision

The detonation of an (hypothetical) improvised nuclear device (IND) can generate atmospheric release of radioactive material in the form of particles and dust that ultimately contaminate the soil. In this study, the detonation of an IND in an urban area was simulated, and its effects on humans were determined. The risk of solid caner development due to radiation was calculated by taking into account prompt radiation and whole-body exposure of individuals near the detonation site up to 10 km. The excess relative risk (ERR) of developing solid cancer was evaluated by using the mathematical relationship from the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) studies and those from the HotSpot code. The methodology consists of using output data obtained from simulations performed with the HotSpot health physics code plugging in such numbers into a specific given equations used by RERF to evaluate the resulting impact. Such a preliminary procedure is expected to facilitate the decision-making process significantly

Simulated nuclear contamination scenario, solid cancer risk assessment, and support to decision

The detonation of an (hypothetical) improvised nuclear device (IND) can generate atmospheric release of radioactive material in the form of particles and dust that ultimately contaminate the soil. In this study, the detonation of an IND in an urban area was simulated, and its effects on humans were determined. The risk of solid cancer development due to radiation was calculated by taking into account prompt radiation and whole-body exposure of individuals near the detonation site up to 10 km. The excess relative risk (ERR) of developing solid cancer was evaluated by using the mathematical relationships from the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) studies and those from the HotSpot code. The methodology consists of using output data obtained from simulations performed with the HotSpot health physics code plugging in such numbers into a specific given equation used by RERF to evaluate the resulting impact. Such a preliminary procedure is expected to facilitate the decision-making process significantly