This portrait of poverty-stricken Southern tenant farmers during the Great Depression has become one of the most influential books of the past century. In the summer of 1936, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of white sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration—and a watershed literary event. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was published to enormous critical acclaim. An unsparing record in words and pictures of this place, the people who shaped the land, and the rhythm of their lives, it would eventually be recognized by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century—and serve as an inspiration to artists from composer Aaron Copland to David Simon, creator of The Wire. With an additional sixty-four archival photos in this edition, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men remains as relevant and important as when it was first published over seventy-seven years ago. “One of the most brutally revealing records of an America that was ignored by society—a class of people whose level of poverty left them as spiritually, mentally, and physically worn as the land on which they toiled. Time has done nothing to decrease this book’s power.” —Library Journal

Agee's colleague at Time in the 1940s, John Hersey, writes a major evaluation of Agee's work and the Agee legend in a new introduction to this literary classic. 64 pages of photos.

A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographer In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a 400-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama, at the height of the Great Depression. The book shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Critic Lionel Trilling called it the “most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.” The origins of Agee and Evans’s famous collaboration date back to an assignment for Fortune magazine, which sent them to Alabama in the summer of 1936 to report a story that was never published. Some have assumed that Fortune’s editors shelved the story because of the unconventional style that marked Famous Men, and for years the original report was presumed lost. But fifty years after Agee’s death, a trove of his manuscripts turned out to include a typescript labeled “Cotton Tenants.” Once examined, the pages made it clear that Agee had in fact written a masterly, 30,000-word report for Fortune. Published here for the first time, and accompanied by thirty of Walker Evans’s historic photos, Cotton Tenants is an eloquent report of three families struggling through desperate times. Indeed, Agee’s dispatch remains relevant as one of the most honest explorations of poverty in America ever attempted and as a foundational document of long-form reporting. As the novelist Adam Haslett writes in an introduction, it is “a poet’s brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice.”

"This collection of essays illuminates a multitude of aspects of James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Among the seventeen essays are the following: David Moltke-Hansen, "Consider the Ancient Generations: Share-Cropping's Strange Compulsion"; Sara Gardner, "A Southerner in New York: James Agee and Literary Manhattan in the 1930s"; David Madden, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Is the Moby-Dick of Nonfiction"; Caroline Blinder, "Ruses and Ruminations: The Architecture of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"; and Jeffrey Couchman, "The Cinematic Eye of James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.""--

“I’ll croak before I write ads or sell bonds—or do anything except write.” James Agee’s father died when he was just six years old, a loss immortalized in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Death in the Family. Three years later, Agee’s mother moved the mourning family from Knoxville, Tennessee, to the campus of St. Andrew’s, an Episcopal boarding school near Sewanee. There, Agee met Father James Harold Flye, who would become his history teacher. Though Agee was just ten, the two struck up an unlikely and enduring friendship, traveling Europe by bicycle and exchanging letters for thirty years, from Agee’s admission to Exeter Academy to his death at forty-five. The intimate letters, collected by Father Flye after Agee’s death, form the most intimate portrait of Agee available, a starkly revealing account of the internal and external life of a tortured twentieth-century genius. Agee candidly shares his struggles with depression, professional failure, and a tumultuous personal life that included three wives and four children. First published in 1962, Letters of James Agee to Father Flye followed the rediscovery of Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the posthumous publication of A Death in the Family, which won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize and became a hit Broadway play and film. The collection sold prolifically throughout the 1960s and ’70s in mass-market editions as a new generation of readers discovered the deep talents of the writer Dwight Macdonald called “the most broadly gifted writer of our American generation.”

In the middle years of the Great Depression, Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White spent eighteen months traveling across the back roads of the Deep South--from South Carolina to Arkansas--to document the living conditions of the sharecropper. Their collaboration resulted in You Have Seen Their Faces, a graphic portrayal of America's desperately poor rural underclass. First published in 1937, it is a classic comparable to Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which it preceded by more than three years. Caldwell lets the poor speak for themselves. Supported by his commentary, they tell how the tenant system exploited whites and blacks alike and fostered animosity between them. Bourke-White, who sometimes waited hours for the right moment, captures her subjects in the shacks where they lived, the depleted fields where they plowed, and the churches where they worshipped.

Novelist, poet, screenwriter, journalist, film critic, and cult hero, James Agee was a man of many talents. This collection examines Agee's achievements from the perspective of family members, friends, and contemporaries to create a multifaceted portrait of a dynamic and influential man. Included are recollections and commentary from Agee's widow, his lifelong friend and teacher Father Flye, his editor David McDowell, and other notables, including John Huston, Andrew Lytle, and Walker Evans, with whom Agee collaborated on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. For this edition, the editors have added new insights from such luminaries as Robert Fitzgerald, Dwight Macdonald, and Frederick Manfred, along with Agee critics Scott Bates, Edward Carlos, James Lee, Edwin M. Sterling, and William Stott. In addition, editor Jeffrey J. Folks has contributed a new preface outlining the state of Agee criticism in the years since the first edition was published in 1974. With liveliness and candor, Remembering James Agee evokes the life and personality of a writer and critic who holds a unique place in American letters.

Words and photographs describe the daily lives of typical sharecropper families in the American South.

In this first full-scale biography, Bergreen makes judicious use of unpublished letters and manuscripts and extensive interviews with people in Agee's life, presenting a compelling account of the personality and career of the novelist, journalist, screenwriter, film critic and poet. Rich in incident and implication, this volume sympathetically depicts his life, hurtled in a storm of marriages, liaisons and heavy drinking, and torn by the conflicting demands of journalistic success and a more private muse. ISBN 0-525-24253-8 : $20.00.

An examination of one of Walker Evans's iconic photographs of the Great Depression. Kitchen Corner, Tenant Farmhouse, Hale County, Alabama shows a painstakingly clean-swept corner in the house of an Alabama sharecropper. Taken in 1936 by Walker Evans as part of his work for the Farm Security Administration, Kitchen Corner was not published until 1960, when it was included in a new edition of Walker Evans and James Agee's classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The 1960 reissue of Evans and Agee's book had an enormous impact on Americans' perceptions of the Depression, creating a memory-image retrospectively through Walker's iconic photographs and Agee's text. In this latest addition to the Afterall One Work series, photographer Olivier Richon examines Kitchen Corner. The photograph is particularly significant, he argues, because it uses a documentary form that privileges detachment, calling attention to overlooked objects and to the architecture of the dispossessed. Given today's growing economic inequality, the photograph feels pointedly relevant. The FSA, established in 1935, commissioned photographers to document the impact of the Great Depression in America and used the photographs to advertise aid relief. For four weeks in the summer of 1936, Evans collaborated with Agee on an article about cotton farmers in the American South. The result of that project was the landmark publication Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, documenting three sharecropper families and their environment. These photographs were intimate, respectful portraits of the farmers, and of their homes, furniture, clothing, and rented land. Kitchen Corner powerfully evokes Agee's observations of the significance of “bareness and space” in these homes: “general odds and ends are set very plainly and squarely discrete from one another... [giving] each object a full strength it would not otherwise have.”