Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, In Words And Photographs, Of Three Tenant Families In The Deep South

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, in Words and Photographs, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South

Review"Renowned for its fusion of social conscience and artistic radicality and for the way Evans's spare, tautly composed images and Agee's more extravagant prose complement and enhance each other." --New York Times -- Review"The "most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation." -- Lionel TrillingA new edition of the classic Depression-era photojournal of life as a southern sharecropper follows three Alabama families as they scrape a living from the land. Reissue.From Library JournalAgee's textual portraits and Evans's photographic records of three sharecropper families in the South instantly became, when published in 1939, 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. This handsome edition sports the original text plus 64 new archival photos.Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.About the AuthorPoet, screenwriter, and journalist James Agee (1909-1955) won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel A DEATH IN THE FAMILY. Walker Evans (1903-1976) is best known for his striking Depression-era photographs. Born in St. Louis, he began his photographic career at twenty-five. He served as an editor for both Fortune and Time and was a professor of graphic arts at Yale. His other books include American Photographs and Message from the Interior.Excerpt. ? Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.'I spoke of this piece of work we were doing as "curious." I hadbetter amplify this.It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying,that it could occur to an association of human beings drawn togetherthrough need and chance and for profit into a company, an organ ofjournalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended andappallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helplessrural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantageand humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings,in the name of science, of "honest journalism" (whatever that paradoxmay mean), of humanity, of social fearlessness, for money, and for areputation for crusading and for unbias which, when skillfully enoughqualified, is exchangeable at any bank for money (and in politics,for votes, job patronage, abelincolnism, etc. *; and that thesepeople could be capable of meditating this prospect without theslightest doubt of their qualification to do an "honest" piece ofwork, and with a conscience better than clear, and in the virtualcertitude of almost unanimous public approval. It seems curious,further, that the assignment of this work should have fallen topersons having so extremely different a form of respect for thesubject, and responsibility toward it, that from the first andinevitably they counted their employers, and that Government likewiseto which one of them was bonded, among their most dangerous enemies,acted as spies, guardians, and cheats, * and trusted no judgment,however authoritative it claimed to be, save their own: which in manyaspects of the task before them was untrained and uninformed. Itseems further curious that realizing the extreme corruptness anddifficulty of the circumstances, and the unlikelihood of achieving inany untainted form what they wished to achieve, they accepted thework in the first place. And it seems curious still further that,with all their suspicion of and contempt for every person and thingto do with the situation, save only for the tenants and forthemselves, and their own intentions, and with all their realizationof the seriousness and mystery of the subject, and of the humanresponsibility they undertook, they so little questioned or doubtedtheir own qualifications for this work.All of this, I repeat, seems to me curious, obscene, terrifying,