Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Front Cover
HMH, Aug 14, 2001 - Photography - 432 pages
This portrait of poverty-stricken Southern tenant farmers during the Great Depression has become one of the most influential books of the past century.

In the summer of 1936, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of white sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration—and a watershed literary event.
 
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was published to enormous critical acclaim. An unsparing record in words and pictures of this place, the people who shaped the land, and the rhythm of their lives, it would eventually be recognized by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century—and serve as an inspiration to artists from composer Aaron Copland to David Simon, creator of The Wire. With an additional sixty-four archival photos in this edition, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men remains as relevant and important as when it was first published over seventy-seven years ago.
 
“One of the most brutally revealing records of an America that was ignored by society—a class of people whose level of poverty left them as spiritually, mentally, and physically worn as the land on which they toiled. Time has done nothing to decrease this book’s power.” —Library Journal
 

Selected pages

Contents

2
Conversation in the Lobby
Inductions
Back Matter
Back Cover
Spine
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2001)

Walker Evans (1903–1975) is best known for his striking Depression-era photographs. He served as an editor for both Fortune and Time and was a professor of graphic arts at Yale. His other books include American Photographs and Message from the Interior.
 
James Agee (1909–1955) was a poet, screenwriter, and journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel A Death in the Family.