Author archaeology is becoming a new field of study in the 21st century. More and more researchers are digging through the manuscripts of dead writers in order to publish what are billed as the original versions of their well-known books.

The latest is James Agee, a singular figure in American literature whose published works are few, but celebrated. He poured a lot of writing time into reviewing films for Time magazine in the 1940s while working on a book that would seal his reputation, "A Death in the Family."

The alcoholic writer died at 45 in 1955, his masterpiece unfinished. The work was put into publishable shape by editor David McDowell and released two years later.

It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was the source for "All the Way Home," the 1962 Broadway play that also won a Pulitzer. A portion of the work, which appeared in 1938 as "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," was set to music by composer Samuel Barber.

Agee was preoccupied all of his life by the death of his father in a car crash in his Tennessee hometown, and while he went on to write for Fortune magazine, where the project that became "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" began, he wanted to write serious fiction.

Agee also wrote screenplays, working on "The African Queen" for director John Huston and "The Night of the Hunter" for Charles Laughton in 1955.

Now, a new book from the University of Tennessee Press shows Agee's masterpiece was a more ambitious novel than the truncated 1957 version. "A Death in the Family, A Restoration of the Author's Text," edited by Tennessee professor Michael Lofaro, is 144 pages longer than the '57 book.

More than 10 new chapters were added and three others were revised from the original. Lofaro assembled the new version from Agee materials in various archives starting in 1988, he told The Associated Press.

Lofaro also restored the regional dialect, names of real people and locations changed in '57 and added a new first chapter. The book costs $49.95 from the university press, but there are plans to release a cheaper trade version.

"A Death in the Family" is the latest in literary excavation. It seems the editing of such greats as Maxwell Perkins is no longer considered good enough, but that we should return to the author's original intentions.

Really problematic, I think, are the efforts of Tess Gallagher, the widow of Raymond Carver, to publish Carver's short stories as he originally wrote them.

Many of his stories, most notably, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," in the 1982 collection of the same name, were extensively changed by Knopf editor Gordon Lish. His radical incisions led to Carver's crowning as king of minimalism, a title that enhanced the writer's quiet career.

Gallagher now plans to release these stories as Carver wrote them, with the title "Beginners." However, editing is traditionally part of the fiction-writing process. It's a collaboration with the author. In Carver's case, he had to approve Lish's changes or the book would not have been published.

If Gallagher's project is allowed to proceed (Knopf is opposing it), we readers will find ourselves transported to the days of "What's My Line?," asking, "Will the real Ray Carver please stand up?"