Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) By James Agee; Photography By Walker Evans

 

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was not originally meant to be a book. It was a feature story assignment by Fortune Magazine to journalist James Agee and photographer Walker Evans. They were sent to rural Alabama during what elsewhere were the final years of the depression era. They were to record the plight of sharecroppers. They so accurately documented the daily reality of these poorest of Americans that the magazine declined to use their stories fearing subscribers to Fortune would not want to read about it. When Agree finally received permission to take the stories to other publishers he met with little success, finally getting it printed in book format, and then it was a commercial failure. It was not until years later the literary world began to recognize its value.

Agee and Evans spent an entire summer visiting and interviewing three different families, often staying at their homes, meeting their extended families, neighbors, ministers. It was a difficult assignment because they had to win the trust of the people whose privacy was being invaded and put on display for the general public, making them fodder for a magazine’s commercial use. Arguing their stories needed to be told was understandably met with skepticism by people whose lives and backbreaking labors had been used repeatedly by landowners and others to make a buck, while they got table scraps – the very root of sharecropping (tenant farming), and only one step above serfdom.

Since the project was imagined as a series of stand-alone articles on each family, putting it in book form was somewhat difficult. In its final form the book is comprised of three family profiles with connecting essays, most of which are philosophical in nature and occasionally make no direct reference to the families. The book’s introduction does a lousy job of preparing the reader for this format. The Library of America publication of the book, which is what I read, includes sixty-four pages of remarkable black & white photography by Walker Evans.

This project and book took place early in the writing career of Agee. He went on to do extensive assignment magazine reporting including coverage of World War II, and earned a reputation as a book, arts, and film critic. Later he became a script writer in Hollywood with his most famous work being on The African Queen (Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn), and the bone-chilling drama The Night of the Hunter (Robert Mitchum and Shelley Winters).

Agee is known for compound sentences, wonderfully descriptive, but one random sample from the book contains 365 words, ten colons and twenty-seven commas before breaking to a new paragraph, not with a period, but with another colon.

Recommendation:  For casual readers I would not recommend this. The problem is not his writing, which while complex is superb; the problem is the lack of structure in the story.