Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
by: James Agee / Walker Evans (Photographer)

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 3rd pr., 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with gilt lettering on spine. 471 pages, Walker Evans photos up front. In the summer of 1936, Agee and 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 in 1941. "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" was first published to enormous critical acclaim. This unsparing record of place, of the people who shaped the land, and of the rhythm of their lives today stands as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. The time is the mid-1930s, in the depths of the Great Depression. Tenant farmers down South are struggling with deepening debt, chronic illnesses in their families (NO health care), land suffering from drought and the hopeless, grinding poverty much of America suffered through in that era. Clean copy. Lacks the dust jacket.