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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
James Agee and Walker Evans
Essays
James Mustich
Jul 28, 2018
In the summer of 1936, Fortune magazine commissioned James Agee and Walker Evans to report on the lives of sharecroppers in the Deep South. Agee was a twenty-six-year-old journalist who’d published a volume of poems two years earlier; Evans was a thirty-two-year-old photographer. The assignment took them to Hale County, Alabama, where they spent eight weeks with three families of tenant farmers. Fortune chose not to run the article that resulted from Agee’s and Evans’s two-month stay, but in 1941 a more significant record of their collaboration finally saw the light: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a landmark volume of photographs and prose that has since been recognized as one of the most remarkable books of the twentieth century.
I knew I was not terribly worldly when I entered college, but I entered a world I never imagined when I opened the pages of this book my freshman year.
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It took me four tries to read this,but listening to it made all the difference. I am a believer now.
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I've voted Life's Too Short. In its defense Walker Evans is an amazing photographer and I highly recommend trying to find a PDF or physical copy so you can enjoy the mesmerizing shots at the beginning of the book. On the flipside, however, James Agee is a terrible writer. I will admit being born in 1995 it's not like 1936 is a very relevant year for me, but I've read books like The Grapes of Wrath before which made me appreciate hard times and what people had to live through during The Depression Era. It is really hard for me to justify these essays, if they can even be called that. Admittedly Agee had some good writing going when he was introducing the characters and I enjoyed getting to know them on an intimate level. I felt like the account of recording every little crevice of these farmers was a drag, but again in the book's defense it serves more as a record these people existed rather than simply to entertain the reader. However, I find it pretty lousy that Agee not only moves away from this intimacy for a majority of the book but he also decides to go on one about what is proper art and how he's justified in his world views. During the middle of the book besides labelling everything here and there, which I can't say is really entertaining in itself, Agee seems to find it prudent to comment on how stars are separate and how out of nowhere he supports communism. I really wish Agee could've focused more on the lives of the farmers; he didn't need to fictionalize a plot for us (something he says art shouldn't do anyway, apparently) but he could've at least tried to stay on subject. Look, it's a lot of material and I won't deny this is an important period of time that deserves recording, but surely unless you're doing a dissertation there must be something more enjoyable or important you could be doing. Take my advice - look at the pretty pictures and move on. The writing is just too dense and not worth it. If you want to know more about 1930s depression struggles then start with Grapes of Wrath. At least that book cares enough to give you a productive narrative.
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"1,000 Books To Read Before You Die" is a registered trademark of Workman Publishing, Inc. Based on the book: 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die by James Mustich, (Workman Publishing Co., Inc.: © 2018 James Mustich)
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