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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families
The clasic that became the prototype of the modern nonfiction novel. A watershed literary event at its first publication in 1941,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
is an "unsparing record of the harsh existence of three Alabama families, and a poetic meditation on the terrible beauty of their lives," recognized by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the century.
591 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1941
685 people are currently reading
12125 people want to read
About the author
James Agee
100 books290 followersNoted American writer and critic James Rufus Agee collaborated with photographer Walker Evans on
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(1941), a bleak depiction of rural poverty and posthumously published his novel
A Death in the Family
(1957).
This author, journalist, poet, screenwriter in the 1940s most influenced films in the United States. His autobiographical work won a Pulitzer Prize.
Life
Born at Highland Avenue and 15th Street (renamed James Agee Street in 1999) to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler. When Agee was six years of age in 1915, his father died in an automobile accident. From the age of seven, he and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in boarding schools. The most influential of these was located near his mother's summer cottage two miles from Sewanee, Tennessee. Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys was run by Episcopal monks affiliated with the Order of the Holy Cross, and it was there that Agee's lifelong friendship with an Episcopal priest, Father James Harold Flye, began in 1919. As Agee's close friend and spiritual confidant, Flye was the recipient of many of Agee's most revealing letters.
Agee went to Knoxville High School for the 1924–1925 school year, then travelled with Father Flye to Europe. On their return, Agee moved to boarding school in New Hampshire, entering the class of 1928 at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, he was president of The Lantern Club and editor of the Monthly where his first short stories, plays, poetry and articles were published. Agee was admitted to Harvard University's class of 1932. He was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Advocate.
In 1951 in Santa Barbara, Agee, a hard drinker and chain-smoker, suffered the first two in a series of heart attacks, which ultimately claimed his life four years later at the age of 45. He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, New York.
Career
After graduation, he wrote for Fortune and Time magazines, although he is better known for his later film criticism in The Nation. In 1934, he published his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage.
In the summer of 1936, Agee spent eight weeks on assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans living among sharecroppers in Alabama. Agee turned the material into a book entitled, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). It sold only 600 copies before being remaindered.
In 1942, Agee became the film critic for Time and, at one point, reviewed up to six films per week. Together, he and friend Whittaker Chambers ran "the back of the book" for Time. He left to become film critic for The Nation. In 1948, however, he quit both magazines to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for Life Magazine about the great silent movie comedians, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon, which has been credited for reviving Keaton's career. As a freelance in the 1950s, he continued to write magazine articles while working on movie scripts, often with photographer Helen Levitt.
Agee was an ardent champion of Charlie Chaplin's then extremely unpopular film Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which has since become a film classic. He was also a great admirer of Laurence Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet, especially Henry V, for which he actually published three separate reviews, all of which have been printed in the collection Agee on Film.
Legacy
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, ignored on its original publication in 1941, has been placed among the greatest literary works of the 20th Century by the New York School of Journalism and the New York Public Library.
This author, journalist, poet, screenwriter in the 1940s most influenced films in the United States. His autobiographical work won a Pulitzer Prize.
Life
Born at Highland Avenue and 15th Street (renamed James Agee Street in 1999) to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler. When Agee was six years of age in 1915, his father died in an automobile accident. From the age of seven, he and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in boarding schools. The most influential of these was located near his mother's summer cottage two miles from Sewanee, Tennessee. Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys was run by Episcopal monks affiliated with the Order of the Holy Cross, and it was there that Agee's lifelong friendship with an Episcopal priest, Father James Harold Flye, began in 1919. As Agee's close friend and spiritual confidant, Flye was the recipient of many of Agee's most revealing letters.
Agee went to Knoxville High School for the 1924–1925 school year, then travelled with Father Flye to Europe. On their return, Agee moved to boarding school in New Hampshire, entering the class of 1928 at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, he was president of The Lantern Club and editor of the Monthly where his first short stories, plays, poetry and articles were published. Agee was admitted to Harvard University's class of 1932. He was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Advocate.
In 1951 in Santa Barbara, Agee, a hard drinker and chain-smoker, suffered the first two in a series of heart attacks, which ultimately claimed his life four years later at the age of 45. He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, New York.
Career
After graduation, he wrote for Fortune and Time magazines, although he is better known for his later film criticism in The Nation. In 1934, he published his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage.
In the summer of 1936, Agee spent eight weeks on assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans living among sharecroppers in Alabama. Agee turned the material into a book entitled, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). It sold only 600 copies before being remaindered.
In 1942, Agee became the film critic for Time and, at one point, reviewed up to six films per week. Together, he and friend Whittaker Chambers ran "the back of the book" for Time. He left to become film critic for The Nation. In 1948, however, he quit both magazines to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for Life Magazine about the great silent movie comedians, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon, which has been credited for reviving Keaton's career. As a freelance in the 1950s, he continued to write magazine articles while working on movie scripts, often with photographer Helen Levitt.
Agee was an ardent champion of Charlie Chaplin's then extremely unpopular film Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which has since become a film classic. He was also a great admirer of Laurence Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet, especially Henry V, for which he actually published three separate reviews, all of which have been printed in the collection Agee on Film.
Legacy
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, ignored on its original publication in 1941, has been placed among the greatest literary works of the 20th Century by the New York School of Journalism and the New York Public Library.
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 493 reviews
April 23, 2024
"James Agee makes Faulkner look clear and concise.... He also shares every single thought to cross his mind, whether they have anything to do with the topic at hand or not... For some, this experience - and it is truly an experience - is enlightening, thought provoking, mind blowing. For others it is mind numbing, eye glazing and a total bore. For me, it was all of the above.... You leave feeling thankful for the moments he shared. And annoyed for all the babble it took to get there." -- Molly
I hope Molly will not mind that I quoted from her Goodreads' review. But she wrote exactly what I felt about Agee and his book and she did it so much better than I am capable of doing. (I have included a link below to her review and I encourage anyone who is interested in the book to read it.)
The book became an overnight classic twenty-five years after Agee was given an assignment to write an article for Fortune magazine in 1936, which the magazine subsequently rejected and never published; twenty years after it was finally published as a book; and five years after its author succumbed to a heart attack in a New York taxi on his way to a doctor's appointment.
Agee was just twenty-six, a poet in the guise of a journalist, when he was given the assignment to travel into the Deep South to do a story on cotton sharecroppers. He asked that a friend of his, thirty-two year old photographer Walker Evans, be hired to accompany him. Evans at the time was working for one of the New Deal agencies, the Farm Security Administration, helping to document the Great Depression. Evans was given a leave of absence and he and Agee headed South during the summer of 1936.
They traveled around for a month before they found the subjects they wanted to photograph and write about. They spent three weeks with three families and then went back to New York to finalize the article and present it to the magazine's editor. The magazine did not publish it. It was believed for many years that Agee's unconventional rambling style was the cause for the editor's rejection of the article. However, decades later it was discovered that that was not the case.
"Isn't every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn't a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?"
At any rate, after the article was rejected, Agee then expanded it into a book and set about to find a publisher. It was five years later that it was published to a resounding sound of silence. It was a miserable failure, partly because the effects of the Great Depression had lessened and because the war in Europe and Asia dominated the news. The book sold only 600 copies the first year and there was no second printing -- not then.
"Picking cotton: it is simple and terrible work. Skill will help you; all the endurance you can draw up against it from the roots of your existence will be thoroughly used as fuel to it; but neither skill nor endurance can make it any easier."
"...and in each private and silent heart toward that climax of one more year's work which yields so little at best, and nothing so often, and worse to so many hundreds of thousands..."
Agee went on to other things; he continued to write poetry; became an influential and highly-respected film critic; and he wrote screenplays for two classic movies: The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter.
But he was a tormented man who fought off his demons with tobacco and alcohol and the combination helped bring on the heart attack that killed him at age forty-five. At the time of his death he was working on an autobiographical novel. Two years after his death, A Death in the Family was published and a year later it received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Two years after that, because of Agee's untimely death and as a result of the critical acclaim for his novel, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was re-published and became an instant classic, not only due to Agee's narrative, but also because of Evans' haunting black-and-white photographs that appear uncaptioned at the beginning of the book.
In 2003, a typescript of Agee's original magazine article was discovered among his papers. It is much different from the book that grew out of the project. It is much more conventional, much more journalistic, and much less poetic. It had not been rejected due to an unconventional writing style after all, but for some other reason or reasons.
In 2013, it was published as Cotton Tenants: Three Families, the title of Agee's rejected magazine article.
----------------------------------------------
Here is the link to Molly's review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
And a link to Walker Evans' photographs:
https://www.google.com/search?q=let+u...
And a link to my review of "Cotton Tenants: Three Families":
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I hope Molly will not mind that I quoted from her Goodreads' review. But she wrote exactly what I felt about Agee and his book and she did it so much better than I am capable of doing. (I have included a link below to her review and I encourage anyone who is interested in the book to read it.)
The book became an overnight classic twenty-five years after Agee was given an assignment to write an article for Fortune magazine in 1936, which the magazine subsequently rejected and never published; twenty years after it was finally published as a book; and five years after its author succumbed to a heart attack in a New York taxi on his way to a doctor's appointment.
Agee was just twenty-six, a poet in the guise of a journalist, when he was given the assignment to travel into the Deep South to do a story on cotton sharecroppers. He asked that a friend of his, thirty-two year old photographer Walker Evans, be hired to accompany him. Evans at the time was working for one of the New Deal agencies, the Farm Security Administration, helping to document the Great Depression. Evans was given a leave of absence and he and Agee headed South during the summer of 1936.
They traveled around for a month before they found the subjects they wanted to photograph and write about. They spent three weeks with three families and then went back to New York to finalize the article and present it to the magazine's editor. The magazine did not publish it. It was believed for many years that Agee's unconventional rambling style was the cause for the editor's rejection of the article. However, decades later it was discovered that that was not the case.
"Isn't every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn't a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?"
At any rate, after the article was rejected, Agee then expanded it into a book and set about to find a publisher. It was five years later that it was published to a resounding sound of silence. It was a miserable failure, partly because the effects of the Great Depression had lessened and because the war in Europe and Asia dominated the news. The book sold only 600 copies the first year and there was no second printing -- not then.
"Picking cotton: it is simple and terrible work. Skill will help you; all the endurance you can draw up against it from the roots of your existence will be thoroughly used as fuel to it; but neither skill nor endurance can make it any easier."
"...and in each private and silent heart toward that climax of one more year's work which yields so little at best, and nothing so often, and worse to so many hundreds of thousands..."
Agee went on to other things; he continued to write poetry; became an influential and highly-respected film critic; and he wrote screenplays for two classic movies: The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter.
But he was a tormented man who fought off his demons with tobacco and alcohol and the combination helped bring on the heart attack that killed him at age forty-five. At the time of his death he was working on an autobiographical novel. Two years after his death, A Death in the Family was published and a year later it received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Two years after that, because of Agee's untimely death and as a result of the critical acclaim for his novel, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was re-published and became an instant classic, not only due to Agee's narrative, but also because of Evans' haunting black-and-white photographs that appear uncaptioned at the beginning of the book.
In 2003, a typescript of Agee's original magazine article was discovered among his papers. It is much different from the book that grew out of the project. It is much more conventional, much more journalistic, and much less poetic. It had not been rejected due to an unconventional writing style after all, but for some other reason or reasons.
In 2013, it was published as Cotton Tenants: Three Families, the title of Agee's rejected magazine article.
----------------------------------------------
Here is the link to Molly's review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
And a link to Walker Evans' photographs:
https://www.google.com/search?q=let+u...
And a link to my review of "Cotton Tenants: Three Families":
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
December 19, 2017
Very few books can knock me like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Originally commissioned as a report back to the Northern seaboard’s intellectua-lites on the state of Southern affairs, ‘reporter’ Agee did something no one saw coming (including himself): he fell in love. In love with the people he lived with and among, the land, the architecture, crops, roads, bedbugs, clothes, patois, sky; the whole cosmic smear of life lived by fundamentally good people at its absolute barest and most brutal.
Famously, the magazine rejected every word he wrote. All the better. Agee proceeded to spend the next 3-years writing and re-writing to novel length, producing as singular a piece of art as ever I’ve encountered. Abetted by his photographer and friend, Walker Evans, he didn’t just break ground—each keystroke ruptured fault lines in the earth and loam like a million-billion capillary beds fissuring ‘neath America’s pallid, translucent White skin.
Agee bares his fucking soul—wondrous and repulsive, as are all—in some of the best pure writing I’ve ever the pleasure. Some vignettes will move you to tears: his approaching the Black couple too quickly; his goodbye to a doomed Gudger girl he loves with true ardor; his fourth-wall blessings. This is holy writing, friends. This is a man confronted with manifold atrocities and subsuming them into his own heart, wishing only that he could burden them for others. Secular transmissions from the nerve-center of the godhead. His empathy and lack of judgment are equal to Vollmann’s, only he can’t stop the demons from fully consuming him like Bill. There is no distance. He bleeds dirt, secretes boll weevils, and cries cotton puffs.
This is emphatically not reportage—it is a post-Joycean, ecclesiastical bloodscream into the chaotic nebulae of darkest space. Let us now praise James Agee, dead at 45. One can only assume that his heart swelled past bursting and exploded over his beloved Alabamian nightscapes as a starburst so marvelous as to be oft mistaken for Venus to this day.
Famously, the magazine rejected every word he wrote. All the better. Agee proceeded to spend the next 3-years writing and re-writing to novel length, producing as singular a piece of art as ever I’ve encountered. Abetted by his photographer and friend, Walker Evans, he didn’t just break ground—each keystroke ruptured fault lines in the earth and loam like a million-billion capillary beds fissuring ‘neath America’s pallid, translucent White skin.
Agee bares his fucking soul—wondrous and repulsive, as are all—in some of the best pure writing I’ve ever the pleasure. Some vignettes will move you to tears: his approaching the Black couple too quickly; his goodbye to a doomed Gudger girl he loves with true ardor; his fourth-wall blessings. This is holy writing, friends. This is a man confronted with manifold atrocities and subsuming them into his own heart, wishing only that he could burden them for others. Secular transmissions from the nerve-center of the godhead. His empathy and lack of judgment are equal to Vollmann’s, only he can’t stop the demons from fully consuming him like Bill. There is no distance. He bleeds dirt, secretes boll weevils, and cries cotton puffs.
This is emphatically not reportage—it is a post-Joycean, ecclesiastical bloodscream into the chaotic nebulae of darkest space. Let us now praise James Agee, dead at 45. One can only assume that his heart swelled past bursting and exploded over his beloved Alabamian nightscapes as a starburst so marvelous as to be oft mistaken for Venus to this day.
October 14, 2007
This is the third time that I've attempted this book and I do not lay books down easily. The best way I can describe it is to say that it is like reading the teenage poetry of William Faulkner. There is much about this book that borders on genius, but far more that obscures. Agee tries so hard to get to The Truth that he ends up with a lot of contextual melodrama. As a result, the book is not so much the story of three tenant farming families so much as it is Agee's opinion of how the families came to be and the circumstances surrounding them as reflected in every threadbare quilt, dirty chicken, and abandoned tin cup in their vicinity. These descriptions are never given with cold detachment, but rather with an obsessive regard that borders frequently on almost erotic indulgence.
November 28, 2008
One of the women who helped raise me was herself the daughter of a Cherokee sharecropper and his African American wife. Nannie did not read or spell very well. She stood six feet tall and had the most beautiful cheekbones I've ever seen on a woman in real life. She taught me the meaning of dignity and the power inherent in having a good and pure soul; she taught me how to properly watch a thunderstorm, which is to say, quietly and with respect.
When I read this book for the first time, in my first year of college in Philadelphia, I was desperately homesick for Nannie, and this book reminded me of her. She had a straightforwardness, a goodness, a trueness, a soul-brightness, that I had taken for granted in the people I grew up with and was having a darn hard time finding among my Ivy League classmates.
James Agee's prose is cumbersome and filling. You should read it like you would read the Koran, or the Bible, or Blake, or any other work that has the potency to give life meaning through words.
Poverty lives among us and likely will for as long as there is humanity. I don't know what to do about it. But I think having read this book a couple of times has given me the heart to see it, and the ache to do something about it. As MF Doom once said, "If you can't understand, then come closer."
When I read this book for the first time, in my first year of college in Philadelphia, I was desperately homesick for Nannie, and this book reminded me of her. She had a straightforwardness, a goodness, a trueness, a soul-brightness, that I had taken for granted in the people I grew up with and was having a darn hard time finding among my Ivy League classmates.
James Agee's prose is cumbersome and filling. You should read it like you would read the Koran, or the Bible, or Blake, or any other work that has the potency to give life meaning through words.
Poverty lives among us and likely will for as long as there is humanity. I don't know what to do about it. But I think having read this book a couple of times has given me the heart to see it, and the ache to do something about it. As MF Doom once said, "If you can't understand, then come closer."
July 28, 2010
Let us now praise the fact that I have finished this book! It took me a month of pecking and absorbing and discarding and revisiting to get through it. A long, strange trip it was stylistically and unlike any journey I've taken before. Let me tell you about it.
James Agee makes Faulkner look clear and concise. He loves nothing more than to ramble on and explore every possible tangent his mind's discovery takes him. And he discovered a lot while living among a cluster of tenant farming families in Alabama in 1936. He shares intricate details of his eye's view of their homes, their land, their features, their mannerisms. He shares absolutely beautiful vignettes of what the experience felt like to him as he interacted with folks or observed things from afar. He also shares every single thought to cross his mind, whether they have anything to do with the topic at hand or not.
For some, this experience - and it is truly an experience - is enlightening, thought provoking, mind blowing. For others it is mind numbing, eye glazing and a total bore. For me, it was all of the above. There were times I was sick and tired of listening to Agee's endless diatribes, opinions and strange allegories. There were times I was sucked in to the scenes he brought to life - I could smell, taste, feel his surroundings. Photographer Walker Evans took some striking photos that stand strongly on their own. But Agee's gift in the details is that he enhances these images with his words to the point of almost being able to crawl into them comfortably.
In the end, the reader is rewarded for their diligence and stubborn attitude with beautiful moments of writing. His ramblings show the man inside the account and bring honesty and basis for his overwhelming emotion for the plight of poverty. He focuses on beauty, dignity and the tireless human spirit to survive - even when the circle seems pointless. You don't leave this book feeling pity. You leave feeling thankful for the moments he shared. And annoyed for all the babble it took to get there.
James Agee makes Faulkner look clear and concise. He loves nothing more than to ramble on and explore every possible tangent his mind's discovery takes him. And he discovered a lot while living among a cluster of tenant farming families in Alabama in 1936. He shares intricate details of his eye's view of their homes, their land, their features, their mannerisms. He shares absolutely beautiful vignettes of what the experience felt like to him as he interacted with folks or observed things from afar. He also shares every single thought to cross his mind, whether they have anything to do with the topic at hand or not.
For some, this experience - and it is truly an experience - is enlightening, thought provoking, mind blowing. For others it is mind numbing, eye glazing and a total bore. For me, it was all of the above. There were times I was sick and tired of listening to Agee's endless diatribes, opinions and strange allegories. There were times I was sucked in to the scenes he brought to life - I could smell, taste, feel his surroundings. Photographer Walker Evans took some striking photos that stand strongly on their own. But Agee's gift in the details is that he enhances these images with his words to the point of almost being able to crawl into them comfortably.
In the end, the reader is rewarded for their diligence and stubborn attitude with beautiful moments of writing. His ramblings show the man inside the account and bring honesty and basis for his overwhelming emotion for the plight of poverty. He focuses on beauty, dignity and the tireless human spirit to survive - even when the circle seems pointless. You don't leave this book feeling pity. You leave feeling thankful for the moments he shared. And annoyed for all the babble it took to get there.
February 26, 2021
Well I managed to finish this, just to say I'd read this so called classic,but the whole thing just annoyed the hell out of me. Talk about obscure writing, this guy was having a laugh.
This, from page 226 of the version that I read:-
"No doubt we overvalue the difference between life and lifelessness, but there is a certain difference, just as, in the situation we are speaking of, a difference is remarkable: the difference between a conjunction of time, place and unconscious consciousness and a conjunction of time,place and conscious consciousness is, so far as we are concerned, the difference between joy and truth and the lack of joy and truth. Unless wonder is nothing in itself,but only a moon which glows only in the mercy of a sense of wonder, and unless the sense of wonder is peculiar to consciousness and is moreover an emotion which, as it matures, consciousness will learn the juvenility of,and discard, or only gratefully refresh itself under the power of as under the power of sleep and the healing vitality of dreams,and all this seems a little more likely than not, the materials which people any intersection of time and place are at all times marvellous, regardless of consciousness........"
WHAT????????
Good Grief.
This, from page 226 of the version that I read:-
"No doubt we overvalue the difference between life and lifelessness, but there is a certain difference, just as, in the situation we are speaking of, a difference is remarkable: the difference between a conjunction of time, place and unconscious consciousness and a conjunction of time,place and conscious consciousness is, so far as we are concerned, the difference between joy and truth and the lack of joy and truth. Unless wonder is nothing in itself,but only a moon which glows only in the mercy of a sense of wonder, and unless the sense of wonder is peculiar to consciousness and is moreover an emotion which, as it matures, consciousness will learn the juvenility of,and discard, or only gratefully refresh itself under the power of as under the power of sleep and the healing vitality of dreams,and all this seems a little more likely than not, the materials which people any intersection of time and place are at all times marvellous, regardless of consciousness........"
WHAT????????
Good Grief.
April 13, 2008
Reading this book is like hanging on to the back of someone on roller skates racing top-speed down a steep hill, with no brakes. There are few books that explore with such rigor the impossibility -- and necessary ideal -- of perfect perspective, or have the audacity to admit melancholy as an action (albeit an insufficent one), not just a solipsistic response to the aesthetic sufferings of others. The maddening ambivalence of this book, and its self-consuming doubt and belief in what it is doing, underscores the headlong, megalomanical under-confidence of the (whether you like it or not) inimitable prose. This is the only book I can think of that isn't sure if it's a book at all, and yet is more of one than most. Recently, William T. Vollmann tried with "Poor People" to attempt something similar, and equally improbable, but no matter how sincere his intent, it simply didn't have the nerve to fail. Agee is willing.
April 11, 2024
In 1936, James Agee was sent to Alabama by Fortune magazine to write a story about the plight of tenant farmers during the Great Depression. His friend, photographer Walker Evans, traveled with him to photograph three families of impoverished tenant farmers in a rural area. The magazine article was not published, but the material was turned into a book in 1941.
"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" opens with sixty-two of Evan's stark black and white photographs in unnumbered pages. Evans documents their gaunt, weary faces, their ragged clothing, and their rundown shelters. There is a feeling of strength and resilience in the eyes of the tenant families who are portrayed with dignity.
James Agee, who was also a poet, wrote the text of the book in several styles. There are beautiful lyrical passages, journalistic descriptions, and stream of consciousness chapters where he often goes off topic. Agee was quite experimental and creative in his presentation with some parts of the book working better than others.
In addition to writing about the tenant farmers, Agee also wrote about how the experience was making him feel. He struggled with the fact that he and Evans were spying on and possibly exploiting these tenant families for their own personal gain. It may have been good journalism, but Agee was revealing the intimate details of their lives to the general public.
The tenant farmer has no land, no house, and sometimes lacks a mule and farming implements. The landlord gives him these in return for his share of cotton and corn. The tenant farmer will also owe the landlord for seed, fertilizer, and ration money that was advanced during the four months of March through June. The ration money usually runs out before the new crops are harvested so they go through some lean, hungry times unless they can find supplemental work at the sawmill or other employment. "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" is an important work documenting both the 1930s and the struggle of the tenant families.
"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" opens with sixty-two of Evan's stark black and white photographs in unnumbered pages. Evans documents their gaunt, weary faces, their ragged clothing, and their rundown shelters. There is a feeling of strength and resilience in the eyes of the tenant families who are portrayed with dignity.
James Agee, who was also a poet, wrote the text of the book in several styles. There are beautiful lyrical passages, journalistic descriptions, and stream of consciousness chapters where he often goes off topic. Agee was quite experimental and creative in his presentation with some parts of the book working better than others.
In addition to writing about the tenant farmers, Agee also wrote about how the experience was making him feel. He struggled with the fact that he and Evans were spying on and possibly exploiting these tenant families for their own personal gain. It may have been good journalism, but Agee was revealing the intimate details of their lives to the general public.
The tenant farmer has no land, no house, and sometimes lacks a mule and farming implements. The landlord gives him these in return for his share of cotton and corn. The tenant farmer will also owe the landlord for seed, fertilizer, and ration money that was advanced during the four months of March through June. The ration money usually runs out before the new crops are harvested so they go through some lean, hungry times unless they can find supplemental work at the sawmill or other employment. "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" is an important work documenting both the 1930s and the struggle of the tenant families.
September 18, 2022
The Book's Origin:
The writing of this book was the result of an assignment from Fortune magazine that sent Agee (writer) and Evans (photographer) into the American South during the summer of 1936 to collect material that could be used in a story about sharecroppers and tenant farmers. This book focuses mainly on three families in Alabama who lived as share cropping tenant farmers with cotton being the primary cash crop. Subsequently the magazine editors rejected the resulting article so Agee and Evan expanded the material into a book and managed to publish it in 1941.
The Book's Reputation:
The first edition sales were a failure. Over the subsequent years acknowledgement of the book's contribution to American literature has grown, and it has become more widely know since the 1960 civil rights era. A followup book published in 1989 titled And their children after them : The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by Maharidge and Williamson, won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
The Book's Message:
The goal of the book is to convey the message that the people being described, though poor, are human beings deserving respect.
What the Book Communicates:
It is true that reader's who finish this book will come away with a fairly good understanding of the lives of the subjects of this work. However, the reader will also learn a lot about the author, Agee, who narrates in first person and in some ways tells more about himself than the tenant farmers he is describing.
The Book's Style
Many parts of the book are written with poetic elan and beauty. However, the ordering of the stories within this book have nothing to do with the chronology in which they were experienced. Books and chapters of the book range from mundane ("Clothes") to overtly artistic (though Agee emphatically demands early in his narrative that the reader not refer to this rendering of journalism as art). There are parts of the book where Agee simply lists the contents of a sharecropper's shack, and at other times describes the meager articles of clothing they have to wear on Sunday. At other times he writes very descriptively about odors.
Self Awareness and Sensitivity of the Author,
Agee is overtly aware of his privileged position as a writer writing about impoverished and relatively powerless people. He suffers from the thought that his writing about them may contribute to their suffering. In a sense he is questioning the morality of the task he's been assigned.
My Comment:
I recently finished reviews of three segments of Proust's In Search of Lost Time in which I complained about the excessive detail contained in his writing. I found Agee's writing to be as detailed as Proust's, but at least he didn't expand it to seven volumes.
The writing of this book was the result of an assignment from Fortune magazine that sent Agee (writer) and Evans (photographer) into the American South during the summer of 1936 to collect material that could be used in a story about sharecroppers and tenant farmers. This book focuses mainly on three families in Alabama who lived as share cropping tenant farmers with cotton being the primary cash crop. Subsequently the magazine editors rejected the resulting article so Agee and Evan expanded the material into a book and managed to publish it in 1941.
The Book's Reputation:
The first edition sales were a failure. Over the subsequent years acknowledgement of the book's contribution to American literature has grown, and it has become more widely know since the 1960 civil rights era. A followup book published in 1989 titled And their children after them : The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by Maharidge and Williamson, won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
The Book's Message:
The goal of the book is to convey the message that the people being described, though poor, are human beings deserving respect.
What the Book Communicates:
It is true that reader's who finish this book will come away with a fairly good understanding of the lives of the subjects of this work. However, the reader will also learn a lot about the author, Agee, who narrates in first person and in some ways tells more about himself than the tenant farmers he is describing.
The Book's Style
Many parts of the book are written with poetic elan and beauty. However, the ordering of the stories within this book have nothing to do with the chronology in which they were experienced. Books and chapters of the book range from mundane ("Clothes") to overtly artistic (though Agee emphatically demands early in his narrative that the reader not refer to this rendering of journalism as art). There are parts of the book where Agee simply lists the contents of a sharecropper's shack, and at other times describes the meager articles of clothing they have to wear on Sunday. At other times he writes very descriptively about odors.
Self Awareness and Sensitivity of the Author,
Agee is overtly aware of his privileged position as a writer writing about impoverished and relatively powerless people. He suffers from the thought that his writing about them may contribute to their suffering. In a sense he is questioning the morality of the task he's been assigned.
My Comment:
I recently finished reviews of three segments of Proust's In Search of Lost Time in which I complained about the excessive detail contained in his writing. I found Agee's writing to be as detailed as Proust's, but at least he didn't expand it to seven volumes.
November 11, 2012
Stunned is the only way I can describe my immediate reaction to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It is not like any other book I have read and not at all what I expected. (And at times funny in ways I'm pretty sure Agee didn't mean it to be.) James Agee was 27 when he wrote it. Unbelievable.
I gave it five stars not because I loved every minute of reading it but because of the effort and because of the way he gets across the plight and horror of sharecropping without sentimentality (though with a fair amount of self-righteousness and some, mmm, bluster I guess for lack of a better word at hand right now).
It's probably not for everybody since he has whole chapters of digression and a fairly heavy writing style. It also takes a while to get used to the list-like descriptions, which also take up whole chapters.
When you are reading it, it's like swimming a deep, hard-running river. You aren't sure where you are, if you will make it through and if you have the strength. When you finish, you can't believe what a beautiful and amazing river you have just swum across.
I gave it five stars not because I loved every minute of reading it but because of the effort and because of the way he gets across the plight and horror of sharecropping without sentimentality (though with a fair amount of self-righteousness and some, mmm, bluster I guess for lack of a better word at hand right now).
It's probably not for everybody since he has whole chapters of digression and a fairly heavy writing style. It also takes a while to get used to the list-like descriptions, which also take up whole chapters.
When you are reading it, it's like swimming a deep, hard-running river. You aren't sure where you are, if you will make it through and if you have the strength. When you finish, you can't believe what a beautiful and amazing river you have just swum across.
August 13, 2007
I wanted to gouge my eyes out many, many times. I can't believe I even gave it 2 stars. Yes, it is a super famous book and has gotten all kinds of acclaim over the past 70 years or so. But James Agee drives me nuts. His writing style gave me a migraine. I did, however, keep the book and may attempt it again one day in the very distant future, once I have forgotten how much it bothered me the first go-round.
December 6, 2014
This appears to be one of those books that inspires either love or hate. A good friend, who grew up the next county over from Hale County, and who is more focused on Southern history than I am, was unable to finish the book. I did finish, although I often did not want to continue. The book is ostensibly a journalistic account of the lives of three white sharecropper families. It fails as journalism. Agee inserts his own editorializing again and again. He presents as fact impressions drawn from his own prejudices. His long disquisition on Alabama education, which he prefaces by noting that he visited in the summer when the children were not in school and therefore that he lacks any knowledge of their education, if filled with commentary that seems to derive from his own assumptions and opinions. He simultaneously attempts to show the poverty and nobility of the farmers, but his attempts are at cross purposes. They are ignorant, yet wiser that the rich. Agee's moralizing often falls apart on his indecisiveness. They don't learn about art, but then again it would be worse for them if they did. Agee constantly presents arguments where he is incapable of committing to one side or the other. The large middle of the book is filled with Agee's OCD documenting of the ephemera of the families - the the point of reproducing fragments of text from scraps of newspaper that he finds in a drawer. The writing is incredibly dry and Agee lacks the skills or framework for effectively conveying what he sees. The book would have been immensely more useful if he had better integrated Evans' photos. (If you choose to read the book, go to the Library of Congress website to get a larger set of Evans' photos, labeled with the names of the subjects.) Even when he presents information, he doesn't provide context. That family heirloom - a glass plate - that he says means more than anything to the wife? He doesn't ask the wife why it is so important and he doesn't attempt to explain. Her story is not important and he isn't really interested in her as a person. His focus is on the thing she cares for. The book also lacks organization, skipping around in focus, which is frustrating. Finally, perhaps in fidelity to his commitment to revealing all, Agee shares his own sexual hangups at a number of points, especially his repeated comments about Pearl, a child of eight years, whom he refers to as "erotic" and having "sexy eyes" and the heir to that "sexually loose 'stock'of which most casual country and smalltown whoredom comes." Why did he need to talk about a an imagined three-way? Why did he seem to seriously consider sleeping with one farmer's wife: "a supremely hot and simple nymph, whose eyes go to bed with every man she sees." Why did he have to share his need for "some tail," his imagined sex with a whore he met on the road, or the possibility of “moving in on that piece of head cheese” after she finished with her current customer? Did his obsessive need to catalogue every nail in the home really require him to go through the farmer's closet and sniff his wife's dirty undies? Why is this mess of useless detail, self-aggrandizing commentary, and sexual hangups so revered when it seems to me that Agee 1. did not really get to know his subjects, only his idea of them; 2. treated their living situation as equivalent to their existence; 3. ignored almost all aspects of their lives (hopes, dreams, faith) in favor of his own relentless thesis that they really are the wretched of the earth; 4. made no serious attempt to place them in the larger political, social, and economic situation (although he does provide useful information on the economics of sharecropping); 5. used their situation to go off on tangents of his own; and 6. made all of these grand pronouncements after pending only three weeks in Alabama.
January 28, 2018
What?
What is this?
What is this?
Why is it so beautiful?
And then dull?
And then arrogant? And then the most humble thing a Harvard kid has ever written?
Why do I want to make every ethnographer I know read it? Even though it aggravates me?
What is this?
What is this?
Why is it so beautiful?
And then dull?
And then arrogant? And then the most humble thing a Harvard kid has ever written?
Why do I want to make every ethnographer I know read it? Even though it aggravates me?
August 27, 2022
Romanzo-reportage, anche fotografico, che è diventato un po’ una leggenda. Una cosa è certa: un po’ ti toglie la pelle. Vollmann nella introduzione a I poveri (un libro che tratta dello stesso argomento con tutt’altra tonalità) scrisse “leggere Sia lode ora a uomini di fama è come prendere uno schiaffo in faccia”. È così. Intanto, perché si capisce ad ogni pagina che la pelle l’ha tolta anche a chi lo scriveva, mentre lo scriveva. E poi, Agee in effetti non perde occasione per prendersi a schiaffi da solo. Per i complessi di colpa dice ancora giustamente Vollmann, ma non solo. Certo, il tema del senso di colpa dell’intellettuale famoso e impotente davanti alla tragedia degli ultimi è importante nel libro. Ma lo è anche Il tema metaletterario del rapporto tra giornalismo e letteratura, tra fedeltà della rappresentazione e creazione artistica, tra dovere della testimonianza e narcisismo.
La cosa migliore è la ricerca della bellezza dell’umano, anche sulle soglie estreme della povertà. Le descrizioni sono ossessivamente minuziose, ma sempre con quello sguardo all’orizzonte lungo delle vite e della condizione generale del vivere. Sempre come fosse davanti a qualcosa che ha del sacro e quindi anche del sublime. Fa pensare alla minuzia devota con cui Melville in Moby Dick parla come se scrivesse un manuale di balene per balenieri. Potrebbe annoiare, ma è in quella punta di noia che si nasconde la percezione del grandioso e non bisogna lasciarsela sfuggire. Lo scova nelle facce, nelle cose, nelle case, nei campi, nelle bestie, nei vestiti, nelle scarpe, nei paesaggio, nello straziante cimitero. Il che, sì, un po’ riscalda il cuore, ma fa anche aumentare la forza dell’effetto che nel lettore fa la tragedia di quel vivere, del vivere. Lo commuove. Lo fa pensare. Nonostante chi scrive lo faccia sempre col ciglio asciutto. Non vuole commuovere anche quando sarebbe umano volerlo e commuoversi. E non vuole nemmeno giustificare, coprire, nascondere la faccia brutta e oscura e degradata di quella umanità.
Poi c’è la cum-passione: la spinta dell’autore, che si percepisce in ogni parola, a condividere e a sottrarre alla solitudine; a riscattare, raccattando in mezzo alla mortificazione della miseria e dello sfruttamento quelle che potrebbero sembrare solo briciole di splendore, di coscienza e di umana nobiltà; e, forse, chissà, persino di speranza. Briciole che sono comunque, alla fine, quanto di più prezioso quegli esseri umani e tutti gli esseri umani, per il semplice fatto di esistere come tali, hanno. È anche questa sensazione di partecipare, questa condivisione a rendere la lettura del libro, alla fine, una semplice, complicata, terribile, accorata consolazione.
Due annotazioni finali.
Il capitolo più esemplare e anche sconvolgente del libro è quello dedicato alla educazione dei bambini, descritta con tanto di argomentazione come pratica criminale di asservimento e come genocidio delle umane potenzialità. E al suo interno sono illuminanti le considerazioni sulla coscienza, sul suo valore salvifico. Ne mette bene in evidenza però anche il risvolto di disperata dannazione che può avere nella vita umana il dono e la sventura di imparare ad essere coscienti.
Il senso più profondo e la parte più bella del libro sta nel capitolo titolato “Due punti”. Che è il suo manifesto, anche poetico, di intenti; ed è quindi una sorta di lirica sinossi del libro. Una quindicina di pagine da leggere assolutamente. E poi, lentamente, da rileggere.
La cosa migliore è la ricerca della bellezza dell’umano, anche sulle soglie estreme della povertà. Le descrizioni sono ossessivamente minuziose, ma sempre con quello sguardo all’orizzonte lungo delle vite e della condizione generale del vivere. Sempre come fosse davanti a qualcosa che ha del sacro e quindi anche del sublime. Fa pensare alla minuzia devota con cui Melville in Moby Dick parla come se scrivesse un manuale di balene per balenieri. Potrebbe annoiare, ma è in quella punta di noia che si nasconde la percezione del grandioso e non bisogna lasciarsela sfuggire. Lo scova nelle facce, nelle cose, nelle case, nei campi, nelle bestie, nei vestiti, nelle scarpe, nei paesaggio, nello straziante cimitero. Il che, sì, un po’ riscalda il cuore, ma fa anche aumentare la forza dell’effetto che nel lettore fa la tragedia di quel vivere, del vivere. Lo commuove. Lo fa pensare. Nonostante chi scrive lo faccia sempre col ciglio asciutto. Non vuole commuovere anche quando sarebbe umano volerlo e commuoversi. E non vuole nemmeno giustificare, coprire, nascondere la faccia brutta e oscura e degradata di quella umanità.
Poi c’è la cum-passione: la spinta dell’autore, che si percepisce in ogni parola, a condividere e a sottrarre alla solitudine; a riscattare, raccattando in mezzo alla mortificazione della miseria e dello sfruttamento quelle che potrebbero sembrare solo briciole di splendore, di coscienza e di umana nobiltà; e, forse, chissà, persino di speranza. Briciole che sono comunque, alla fine, quanto di più prezioso quegli esseri umani e tutti gli esseri umani, per il semplice fatto di esistere come tali, hanno. È anche questa sensazione di partecipare, questa condivisione a rendere la lettura del libro, alla fine, una semplice, complicata, terribile, accorata consolazione.
Due annotazioni finali.
Il capitolo più esemplare e anche sconvolgente del libro è quello dedicato alla educazione dei bambini, descritta con tanto di argomentazione come pratica criminale di asservimento e come genocidio delle umane potenzialità. E al suo interno sono illuminanti le considerazioni sulla coscienza, sul suo valore salvifico. Ne mette bene in evidenza però anche il risvolto di disperata dannazione che può avere nella vita umana il dono e la sventura di imparare ad essere coscienti.
Il senso più profondo e la parte più bella del libro sta nel capitolo titolato “Due punti”. Che è il suo manifesto, anche poetico, di intenti; ed è quindi una sorta di lirica sinossi del libro. Una quindicina di pagine da leggere assolutamente. E poi, lentamente, da rileggere.
June 11, 2018
A life altering read. The sort that very seldom comes along...
March 27, 2024
totally singular high modernist book that is ostensibly about the condition of southern sharecroppers in the depression era southern usa, but like many books of this ilk it has a much wider range of concerns. on the one hand agee really does want to embody and explain the conditions of the sharecroppers he met and spent time with in as detailed and true to life manner as possible, but on the other hand there is a constant awareness that a work of art(which the book sometimes claims not to be)'s ability to represent reality at all is questionable. interspersed with the descriptions of the share cropping families, vignettes featuring them, almost nouveau roman like descriptions of their houses and furniture there are also impassioned rants against the codification of art, the inadequacy of education(the rural southern schools but also education in general) in actually educating anyone, text fragments from sources as diverse as blues songs, william blake and marx and the very nice photos by walker evans that serve as an accompaniment to the text. i don't know if the book would work as well as it does if agee weren't an incredible stylist, with the ability to turn out sentences with truly astonishing rhythms. faulkner is an obvious influence here and has been namechecked in a bunch of reviews but there's an archaism about the prose that sometimes reminded me of thomas browne. it helps that agee is seemingly incapable of writing badly about almost anything, even his descriptions of mundane objects can turn into totally riveting prose, as in this passage describing an oil lamp:
"In this globe, and in this oil that is clear and light as water, and reminding me of creatures and things once alive which I have seen suspended in jars in a frightening smell of alcohol - serpents, tapeworms, toads, embryons, all drained one tan pallor of absolute death; and also the serene, scarved flowers in untroubled wombs (and pale-tanned too, flaccid, and in the stench of exhibited death, those children of fury, patience and love which stand in the dishonors of accepted fame, and of the murdering of museum staring); in this globe like a thought, a dream, the future, slumbers the stout-weft strap of wick, and up this wick is drawn the oil, toward heat; through a tight, flat tube of tin, and through a little slotted smile of golden tin, and there ends fledged with flame, in the flue, the flame, a clean fanged fan:"
A typical broom from a sharecropper household:
"The broom is of the cheap thirty-to-forty-cent kind and is nearly new, but do not be misled: the old one, still held in limbo because nearly nothing is thrown away, was well used before it was discarded: it has about the sweeping power of a club foot."
On journalism:
"Journalism is true in the sense that everything is true to the state of being and to what conditioned and produced it (which is also, but less so perhaps, a limitation of art and science) : but that is about as far as its value goes. This is not to accuse or despite journalism for anything beyond its own complacent delusion and its enormous power to poison the public with the same delusion, that it is telling the truth even of what it tells of. Journalism can within its own limits be 'good' or 'bad', 'true' or 'false', but it is not in the nature of journalism even to approach any less relative degree of truth. Again, journalism is not to be blamed for this; no ore than a cow is to be blamed for not being a horse. The difference is, and the reason one can respect or anyhow approve of the cow, that few cows can have the delusion or even the desire to be horses, and that none of them could get away with it even with a small part of the public. The very blood and semen of journalism, on the contrary, is a broad and successful form of lying. Remove that form of lying and you no longer have journalism."
"Words cannot embody; they can only describe. But a certain kind of artist, whom we will distinguish from others as a poet rather than a prose writer, despises this fact about words or his medium, and continually brings words as near as he can to the llusion of embodiment. In doing so he accepts a falsehood but makes, of a sort in any case, better art. It seems very possibly true that art's superiority over science and all other forms of human activity, and its inferiority to them, reside in the identical fact that art accepts the most dangerous and impossible of bargains and makes the best of it, becoming, as a result, both nearer the truth and farther from it than those things which, like science and scientific art, merely describe, and those things which, like human beings and the entire state of nature, merely are, the truth."
"In this globe, and in this oil that is clear and light as water, and reminding me of creatures and things once alive which I have seen suspended in jars in a frightening smell of alcohol - serpents, tapeworms, toads, embryons, all drained one tan pallor of absolute death; and also the serene, scarved flowers in untroubled wombs (and pale-tanned too, flaccid, and in the stench of exhibited death, those children of fury, patience and love which stand in the dishonors of accepted fame, and of the murdering of museum staring); in this globe like a thought, a dream, the future, slumbers the stout-weft strap of wick, and up this wick is drawn the oil, toward heat; through a tight, flat tube of tin, and through a little slotted smile of golden tin, and there ends fledged with flame, in the flue, the flame, a clean fanged fan:"
A typical broom from a sharecropper household:
"The broom is of the cheap thirty-to-forty-cent kind and is nearly new, but do not be misled: the old one, still held in limbo because nearly nothing is thrown away, was well used before it was discarded: it has about the sweeping power of a club foot."
On journalism:
"Journalism is true in the sense that everything is true to the state of being and to what conditioned and produced it (which is also, but less so perhaps, a limitation of art and science) : but that is about as far as its value goes. This is not to accuse or despite journalism for anything beyond its own complacent delusion and its enormous power to poison the public with the same delusion, that it is telling the truth even of what it tells of. Journalism can within its own limits be 'good' or 'bad', 'true' or 'false', but it is not in the nature of journalism even to approach any less relative degree of truth. Again, journalism is not to be blamed for this; no ore than a cow is to be blamed for not being a horse. The difference is, and the reason one can respect or anyhow approve of the cow, that few cows can have the delusion or even the desire to be horses, and that none of them could get away with it even with a small part of the public. The very blood and semen of journalism, on the contrary, is a broad and successful form of lying. Remove that form of lying and you no longer have journalism."
"Words cannot embody; they can only describe. But a certain kind of artist, whom we will distinguish from others as a poet rather than a prose writer, despises this fact about words or his medium, and continually brings words as near as he can to the llusion of embodiment. In doing so he accepts a falsehood but makes, of a sort in any case, better art. It seems very possibly true that art's superiority over science and all other forms of human activity, and its inferiority to them, reside in the identical fact that art accepts the most dangerous and impossible of bargains and makes the best of it, becoming, as a result, both nearer the truth and farther from it than those things which, like science and scientific art, merely describe, and those things which, like human beings and the entire state of nature, merely are, the truth."
August 5, 2017
Difficile commentare un testo che non è *solo* un testo letterario, che non vorrebbe descrivere e narrare per il gusto del farlo, ma per riportare la Bellezza della Vita sulla pagina. Difficile seguire Agee nei lunghi elenchi minuziosi, nei chiarissimi e complicatissimi salti di pensiero emotivo che procedono per pagine e pagine. Difficile non ritornare sempre alle immagini di Evans dell'inizio, per ritrovare in quegli sguardi i nomi, in quelle case le stanze, in quegli occhi l'Alabama del caldo e della miseria. Difficile imbattersi in questo testo a meno che non lo si vada a cercare, come un discepolo che sceglie il maestro. Il libro di Agee ed Evans attende, tra i remainders, occhi e umanità per ritornare a vivere della stessa illuminazione che ha colto due spie, che agendo *nello* scorrere del tempo hanno creato un'opera che rimane al di sopra di esso.
May 23, 2008
It took me forever to get around to reading this, but boy, am I glad I did. It's a moving and incredibly heartfelt look at the suffering of the poor during the Depression (and a rather effective defense of FDR's reaction to it), and one of the most deft blends of fiction and journalism I've ever read.
November 22, 2018
Beginning on page 123, there’s a forty-seven-page description of a wooden shack. After finishing this section, I was shocked to discover that Agee was about to describe two more wooden shacks.
November 18, 2012
I absolutely loathe his book.
A 92 page (or some ridiculous number like that) description of a wooden shack.
This is a perfect example of experimental style over substance, and it's basically unreadable. The only redeeming quality is Walker Evans's astounding photography.
Never attempt to read this book.
A 92 page (or some ridiculous number like that) description of a wooden shack.
This is a perfect example of experimental style over substance, and it's basically unreadable. The only redeeming quality is Walker Evans's astounding photography.
Never attempt to read this book.
June 8, 2022
When I started reading this book, my head was spinning. I was expecting a straightforward piece of jounalism about poor tenant farmers in Alabama with a bit of a leftest slant. It was anything but that. Over the course of the book we do learn a lot about the lives, families and work of these desperately poor people, but it's a roundabout journey, and the style of the writing is not normal journalism - it's a high blown style, rich in vocabulary, metaphor and rhetorical flourishes that shows great writing talent but also marks Mr. Agee with his Philips Exeter/Harvard education that puts him on the other side of the universe from his subjects. It took me a beat to figure out that's part of the point. Mr. Agee avoids the sin that today we call cultural appropriation by telling us with his every word that he is looking at these people from the outside, that no matter how much he wants to befriend them, respect them and be accepted by them, he can never really do that. Yes, he's another Southern boy and has seen poverty, but as much as he is a part of the Southern culture in which these people live, Mr. Agee is also alienated from their world in a hundred ways. So the style of his writing becomes a form of honesty, always reminding us of the barely bridgeable distance between writer and subject.
Then I think that there is another reason for the high style of the writing - it is used to elevate the people he is writing about, to make them heroes of a sort. The initial clue to this is the title. Famous men? Who is famous here? But the sincerity of Mr. Agee's admiration of these people and the beauty he finds in their simple hardscrabble existence ennobles them. It's like Homer, whose beautiful exposition turned a gang of Bronze Age bandits on a mission of murder and rapine into our greatest literary heroes. Mr. Agee's forty page description of a two room tenant house reminded me of the catalog of ships in the Iliad where excruciating detail is used to bring our perception to a different level. Mr. Agee's program of making simple people into heroes also reminded me of Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat, in which the poor and simple Mexican Americans of Monterey become the Knights of the Round Table, but I thought that Mr. Agee did it better.
Then I think that there is another reason for the high style of the writing - it is used to elevate the people he is writing about, to make them heroes of a sort. The initial clue to this is the title. Famous men? Who is famous here? But the sincerity of Mr. Agee's admiration of these people and the beauty he finds in their simple hardscrabble existence ennobles them. It's like Homer, whose beautiful exposition turned a gang of Bronze Age bandits on a mission of murder and rapine into our greatest literary heroes. Mr. Agee's forty page description of a two room tenant house reminded me of the catalog of ships in the Iliad where excruciating detail is used to bring our perception to a different level. Mr. Agee's program of making simple people into heroes also reminded me of Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat, in which the poor and simple Mexican Americans of Monterey become the Knights of the Round Table, but I thought that Mr. Agee did it better.
February 27, 2010
I give up, I can't finish this nor ever will. Walker Evans begins the book with a few dozen photos, most of which are mediocre at best, a handful of which are among the best photos ever taken. Agee's text, too, is a mixed bag, although the avalanche of dross so completely mires the gems that I found myself flipping through ten pages at a time, looking for a paragraph worth reading. Agee goes through convulsions of angst, trying to find some way to tell us about the lives of 3 poor tenant farmers' families without being condescending or romantic. His response is a mountain of maudlin prose, reams of lists of the contents of every shelf and closet, whole chapters of poetic drivel about the divinity of man and the wheeling stars and god knows what else besides. Inside this monstrous book is a brilliant magazine story crying for release: 10 great photos, 20 graceful pages of reporting. I hope some day an unawed editor will produce it.
May 1, 2025
Probably the most emotionally resonant book I've ever read. Not just the subject matter, but the writing itself, the way it's written, the way it's structured, everything about it is just brilliant. Makes sense it was Jimmy Carter's favourite book besides his Bible—and one of Cormac McCarthy's greatest literary influences. (that's how I stumbled upon it)
It's poetry (less so the pages of plain description of clothing and structure, but even then..) It's shattering, profound, carefully constructed, and deeply perceptive. It made me tear up, it made me angry, made me think, made me contemplate, made me keep reading. It completely shattered me at parts. It makes you rethink your life and what's difficult. My life is full of incomparable trivialities compared to the struggles of tenant farmers. Makes you appreciate what you have, and work harder for what you want. It's impossible to really summarize. It's not structured like a book, really. Vignettes? Sort of. Not sure. The writing itself is the crux of everything. James Agee had some gift of sight that translated directly to language thats inimitable. A direct honesty and self awareness, a tender and almost insecure level of others perception of him, and a lyrical and poetic interpretation of the mundane into something transcendent. It's impossible to write like this without some inextricable gift. It's hardly perfect as a book, and definitely not for everyone, but as a stand alone work of whatever you want to call it, it's as close to perfect as you'll get in my opinion. I can only imagine the power it had on the people of its time who read it.
My notes are full of saved passages, but this page of the 'Work' chapter is especially poignant:
"The plainness and iterativeness of work must be one of the things which make it so extraordinarily difficult to write of. The plain details of a task once represented, a stern enough effort in itself, how is it possibly to be made clear enough that this same set of leverages has been undertaken by this woman in nearly every day of the eleven or the twenty-five years since her marriage, and will be persisted in in nearly every day to come in all the rest of her life; and that it is only one among the many processes of wearying effort which make the shape of each one of her living days; how is it to be calculated, the number of times she has done these things, the number of times she is still to do them; how conceivably in words is it to be given as it is in actuality, the accumulated weight of these actions upon her; and what this cumulation has made of her body; and what it has made of her mind and of her heart and of her being. And how is this to be made so real to you who read of it, that it will stand and stay in you as the deepest and most iron anguish and guilt of your existence that you are what you are, and that she is what she is, and that you cannot for one moment exchange places with her, nor by any such hope make expiation for what she has suffered at your hands, and for what you have gained at hers: but only by consuming all that is in you into the never relaxed determination that this shall be made different and shall be made right, and that of what is 'right' some, enough to die for, is clear already, and the vast darkness of the rest has still, and far more passionately and more skeptically than ever before, to be questioned into, defended, and learned toward. There is no way of taking the heart and the intelligence by the hair and of wresting it to its feet, and of making it look this terrific thing in the eyes: which are such gentle eyes: you may meet them, with all the summoning of heart you have, in the photograph in this volume of the young woman with black hair: and they are to be multiplied, not losing the knowledge that each is a single, unrepeatable, holy individual, by the two billion human creatures who are alive upon the planet today; of whom a few hundred thousands are drawn into complications of specialized anguish, but of whom the huge swarm and majority are made and acted upon as she is: and of all these individuals, contemplate, try to encompass, the one annihilating cord."
It's poetry (less so the pages of plain description of clothing and structure, but even then..) It's shattering, profound, carefully constructed, and deeply perceptive. It made me tear up, it made me angry, made me think, made me contemplate, made me keep reading. It completely shattered me at parts. It makes you rethink your life and what's difficult. My life is full of incomparable trivialities compared to the struggles of tenant farmers. Makes you appreciate what you have, and work harder for what you want. It's impossible to really summarize. It's not structured like a book, really. Vignettes? Sort of. Not sure. The writing itself is the crux of everything. James Agee had some gift of sight that translated directly to language thats inimitable. A direct honesty and self awareness, a tender and almost insecure level of others perception of him, and a lyrical and poetic interpretation of the mundane into something transcendent. It's impossible to write like this without some inextricable gift. It's hardly perfect as a book, and definitely not for everyone, but as a stand alone work of whatever you want to call it, it's as close to perfect as you'll get in my opinion. I can only imagine the power it had on the people of its time who read it.
My notes are full of saved passages, but this page of the 'Work' chapter is especially poignant:
"The plainness and iterativeness of work must be one of the things which make it so extraordinarily difficult to write of. The plain details of a task once represented, a stern enough effort in itself, how is it possibly to be made clear enough that this same set of leverages has been undertaken by this woman in nearly every day of the eleven or the twenty-five years since her marriage, and will be persisted in in nearly every day to come in all the rest of her life; and that it is only one among the many processes of wearying effort which make the shape of each one of her living days; how is it to be calculated, the number of times she has done these things, the number of times she is still to do them; how conceivably in words is it to be given as it is in actuality, the accumulated weight of these actions upon her; and what this cumulation has made of her body; and what it has made of her mind and of her heart and of her being. And how is this to be made so real to you who read of it, that it will stand and stay in you as the deepest and most iron anguish and guilt of your existence that you are what you are, and that she is what she is, and that you cannot for one moment exchange places with her, nor by any such hope make expiation for what she has suffered at your hands, and for what you have gained at hers: but only by consuming all that is in you into the never relaxed determination that this shall be made different and shall be made right, and that of what is 'right' some, enough to die for, is clear already, and the vast darkness of the rest has still, and far more passionately and more skeptically than ever before, to be questioned into, defended, and learned toward. There is no way of taking the heart and the intelligence by the hair and of wresting it to its feet, and of making it look this terrific thing in the eyes: which are such gentle eyes: you may meet them, with all the summoning of heart you have, in the photograph in this volume of the young woman with black hair: and they are to be multiplied, not losing the knowledge that each is a single, unrepeatable, holy individual, by the two billion human creatures who are alive upon the planet today; of whom a few hundred thousands are drawn into complications of specialized anguish, but of whom the huge swarm and majority are made and acted upon as she is: and of all these individuals, contemplate, try to encompass, the one annihilating cord."
Read
July 4, 2023Part poetry, part field notes, part experimental prose, part daydreams, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men brings us into the lives of three white Alabama tenant families through Mr. Agee’s pen and Mr. Percy’s lens. We come to know much about the physical environment these folk called home, along with the sounds, the smells, and the feel. Mr. Agee took liberty with his writing, using the colon with greater frequency than I have ever seen previously; there’s even a section titled “Colon”. My father was born the same month work began on this book, so this effort takes on a special quality. He was lucky to be born in the north, far from the Gudgers, Ricketts and Woods. I wouldn’t be experiencing life as I now do if he had counted them as neighbors.
The title might suggest an honor, a nobility to be had in poverty. No, this poverty is horrid along every dimension. How could conditions like this occur and then persist? Because the affected were too uneducated to know otherwise, and even if they did stumble upon awareness, they were too poor to do anything about it. Further, property owners were quite satisfied in having their impoverished tenants remain uneducated and indebted. Since this perpetuating model provided a natural need for large families, there was little prospect for a new order. I believe that a current survey of morbidity, life expectancy, education, crime rates, and healthcare – to pick on just a few qualities of life – would demonstrate the unfortunate legacy bequeathed to large swathes of our country. Might the orchestrators now complement themselves on a job well done?
I felt Mr. Agee muted the horrors that afflict these rural folk, particularly concerning the subject of abuse. While he didn’t spend enough time among these families to render a proper accounting, he did offer a hint of what he did observe in his remarks for the mule and the farmer: “But any proper set of suggestions, far less statements about this, and about the causes and kinds of sadism in the South, would require more space, time, and understanding than I have at present.” Some things shouldn’t be discussed too widely, especially if they deal with silly things like reprehensible truths that require space, time, and understanding.
I’ll leave with one worthy vignette. Mr. Agee got his car stuck in the mud trying to return from his initial visit to the Gudger’s, far removed from any town. George Gudger had invited Mr. Agee to spend the evening with the family, which Mr. Agee did his best to decline. Now returning to the home needing a place to stay, Mr. Agee had to confront the guilt of his previous refusal. The Gudger’s had already turned in for the night, however, they fed Mr. Agee and then rearranged family members to free him a bed. There, regiments of bedbugs, lice and fleas ate heartily.
The title might suggest an honor, a nobility to be had in poverty. No, this poverty is horrid along every dimension. How could conditions like this occur and then persist? Because the affected were too uneducated to know otherwise, and even if they did stumble upon awareness, they were too poor to do anything about it. Further, property owners were quite satisfied in having their impoverished tenants remain uneducated and indebted. Since this perpetuating model provided a natural need for large families, there was little prospect for a new order. I believe that a current survey of morbidity, life expectancy, education, crime rates, and healthcare – to pick on just a few qualities of life – would demonstrate the unfortunate legacy bequeathed to large swathes of our country. Might the orchestrators now complement themselves on a job well done?
I felt Mr. Agee muted the horrors that afflict these rural folk, particularly concerning the subject of abuse. While he didn’t spend enough time among these families to render a proper accounting, he did offer a hint of what he did observe in his remarks for the mule and the farmer: “But any proper set of suggestions, far less statements about this, and about the causes and kinds of sadism in the South, would require more space, time, and understanding than I have at present.” Some things shouldn’t be discussed too widely, especially if they deal with silly things like reprehensible truths that require space, time, and understanding.
I’ll leave with one worthy vignette. Mr. Agee got his car stuck in the mud trying to return from his initial visit to the Gudger’s, far removed from any town. George Gudger had invited Mr. Agee to spend the evening with the family, which Mr. Agee did his best to decline. Now returning to the home needing a place to stay, Mr. Agee had to confront the guilt of his previous refusal. The Gudger’s had already turned in for the night, however, they fed Mr. Agee and then rearranged family members to free him a bed. There, regiments of bedbugs, lice and fleas ate heartily.
January 31, 2011
In summer 1936, James Agee and photographer Walker Evans went to spend a few months in Alabama amongst three tenant farmer families. Their goal was not necessarily to report or even understand these "beautiful" men and women, but to render them on the page in such a way that it does justice to their brillance, their largeness. The result is one of the most sensitive, pained, compassionate, utterly human pieces of writing I've ever read, second maybe only to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, who was one of Agee's literary "fathers."
Agee's prose is full of exhausting labyrinthine sentences and strange punctuation, and it requires patience. The book is an unusual blend of genre that gives no lip service to the "normal" way nonfiction books are written. Agee, who is wrestling with the nature of reality and art and the paradox of "honest journalism," is trying to create a whole new genre. It is probably a failed effort, but it is also quite possibly the most beautiful literary "attempt and failure" ever published.
There is a lot of warning on this site to read Agee in small doses. I can understand this advice, but I must disagree. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is best read in long, extended sittings. Walker Evans, in the 1960 preface, spoke of night as Agee's time, and so he advises to read Famous Men at night. I second his suggestion.
My expectations for this work weren't especially high, but it turns out that Agee and Evans' book is one of the most powerful reading experiences of my life. It is not just the dazzling efforts of a master writer (which it is) nor a painfully close look at a part of history I know very little (which it is as well). Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a document of two young men's quest to give name to the desire of each and every human individual to be acknowledged and to acknowledge, to be recognized and to recognize, to be seen and to see, to be valued and respected, to value and respect. To Agee and Evans, strangers should not stay strange. We must learn how to challenge ourselves to look into the lives of every human being and interact with all in such a way that honors their dignity and inherent beauty.
This book has already changed my life. I urge you all to read it, one day.
Agee's prose is full of exhausting labyrinthine sentences and strange punctuation, and it requires patience. The book is an unusual blend of genre that gives no lip service to the "normal" way nonfiction books are written. Agee, who is wrestling with the nature of reality and art and the paradox of "honest journalism," is trying to create a whole new genre. It is probably a failed effort, but it is also quite possibly the most beautiful literary "attempt and failure" ever published.
There is a lot of warning on this site to read Agee in small doses. I can understand this advice, but I must disagree. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is best read in long, extended sittings. Walker Evans, in the 1960 preface, spoke of night as Agee's time, and so he advises to read Famous Men at night. I second his suggestion.
My expectations for this work weren't especially high, but it turns out that Agee and Evans' book is one of the most powerful reading experiences of my life. It is not just the dazzling efforts of a master writer (which it is) nor a painfully close look at a part of history I know very little (which it is as well). Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a document of two young men's quest to give name to the desire of each and every human individual to be acknowledged and to acknowledge, to be recognized and to recognize, to be seen and to see, to be valued and respected, to value and respect. To Agee and Evans, strangers should not stay strange. We must learn how to challenge ourselves to look into the lives of every human being and interact with all in such a way that honors their dignity and inherent beauty.
This book has already changed my life. I urge you all to read it, one day.
June 11, 2017
This book contains a treasure trove of sociological data: it's an intimate look at three Alabama sharecropper families. Their possessions, clothes, their speech, education, daily activities, etc., all exhaustively detailed.
What makes this book timeless, though, is the prose. Agee clearly felt deeply and passionately about his subjects and had the literary firepower to etch them into history.
Maybe a little too much firepower. I believe Agee wrote most of this in his mid-twenties, and indeed it has the romanticism of a young man. I sometimes felt that the prose was overly flowery and earnest given the subject matter. Like this paragraph on Woods' shirt: "The shirt is home made out of a fertilizer sack. The cloth, by use and washing, is of a heavy and delicious look: as if pure cream were pressed into a fabric an eighth of an inch thick, and were cut and sewn into a garment." Overkill, no?
I also had to dock the book one star for the intermittent leching on the girls and women.
What makes this book timeless, though, is the prose. Agee clearly felt deeply and passionately about his subjects and had the literary firepower to etch them into history.
Maybe a little too much firepower. I believe Agee wrote most of this in his mid-twenties, and indeed it has the romanticism of a young man. I sometimes felt that the prose was overly flowery and earnest given the subject matter. Like this paragraph on Woods' shirt: "The shirt is home made out of a fertilizer sack. The cloth, by use and washing, is of a heavy and delicious look: as if pure cream were pressed into a fabric an eighth of an inch thick, and were cut and sewn into a garment." Overkill, no?
I also had to dock the book one star for the intermittent leching on the girls and women.
January 3, 2008
This book is the musings of James Agee about a short period of time he spend wandering Alabama and living with three tenant families there. It is complemented by some wonderful, compassionate and compelling photographs taken by Walker Evans. I must say that I had a difficult time getting through this book. It was one of the slower reads I've had in a long time. I kept getting lost in the language. Agee uses lots of colons and very little other punctuation; also he speaks in a highly descriptive poetic fashion. I would lose the subject by the time I got to the verb, that kind of thing. Nevertheless this book was written with a militant love for the tenant farmers described. Agee sees the good of the world in them, but does not wish to saint them in any way... just resist their societal demonization. You'll need some time and some good strong coffee... it's best not to read when tired, but it is a strong book and good in different ways then novels are good.
July 25, 2010
I know this book is critically acclaimed. It just really didn't work that well for me. The book is about a trip James Agee (Harvard-educated journalist for Forbes at the time) and Walker Evans (photographer) take to backwoods Alabama to see what the lives of sharecroppers are like. I don't think I'm ruining anything if I tell you this-their lives are hard. Harder than most people could imagine. Agee does an amazing job at describing the families he meets with. Evans' pictures are stark but soft. What frustrates me is Agee's frequent self-serving rants about his own awkward feelings toward the sharecroppers. I found these segments pretentious. And there's just too many of them for me to say this book was great. Yes, it's an important book with some good writing. But that doesn't make me overlook Agee's frequent navel-gazing.
May 14, 2018
Why this book is considered a classic and “one of the most influential books of the 20th Century” is beyond me. I bailed about 70 pages in. The writing is terrible—just meandering prose that drones on without saying anything. Nothing much happens other than the author contemplating his navel when he isn’t engaging in par-for-the-times racism. Not every book grabs you on page one, but if it hasn’t grabbed you by page 70, either the editor should be fired or the book flat out sucks. I’m done with this horrible thing.
July 18, 2010
This info describes the OC Library copy which I'm reading:
Cover: mud gray green with the title left margin reconciled like so:
Let
Us
Now
Praise
Famous Men
with black lettering except the word Praise which is white -- authors name lower right above Photograpsher Walker Evans name
Hardcover; 471 pp
Copyrights 1939, 1940 James Agee; 1941 James Agee and Walker Evans; 1969 Walker Evans. Third Printing Riverside Press Cambridge Massachusetts USA
Cover: mud gray green with the title left margin reconciled like so:
Let
Us
Now
Praise
Famous Men
with black lettering except the word Praise which is white -- authors name lower right above Photograpsher Walker Evans name
Hardcover; 471 pp
Copyrights 1939, 1940 James Agee; 1941 James Agee and Walker Evans; 1969 Walker Evans. Third Printing Riverside Press Cambridge Massachusetts USA
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