Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families

Summary

A landmark work of American photojournalism "renowned for its fusion of social conscience and artistic radicality" (New York Times)

In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was first published in 1941 to enormous critical acclaim. This unsparing record of place, of the people who shaped the land, and the rhythm of their lives is intensely moving and unrelentingly honest, and today—recognized by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century—it stands as a poetic tract of its time.

With a sixty-four-page photographic prologue featuring archival reproductions of Evans' classic images, this book offers readers a window into a remarkable slice of American history.