James Agee (1909–1955)

Honestly? One of the greatest, most poetic & rage-filled books I've ever read. It grabbed me by the throat from the beginning and rarely let go.

I want to see ALL Walker Evans' photographs.

I suppose there are aspects of this that are ... problematic by today's standards. I wound up not caring, because ... well ...

... god DAMN. This BOOK. The main problem with a book like this is that it makes most other books look like piffle.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is James Agee's and Walker Evans' famous book about white sharecroppers* in Hale County, Alabama during the Great Depression. It was the outgrowth of a report they did for Fortune magazine, a report which was not published, for reasons that are not certain, and that had long been thought lost. This is that report. It is blunt and unsparing. It is an indictment of the agricultural, social and political systems of the South that kept hard-working people living in show more appalling conditions, poorly nourished, undereducated, and eternally in debt to those whose land they tilled.

This is a straight-forward telling. It is not prettified or fictionalized. In this report, unlike their book, the families are given their true names. The descriptions of their daily lives, the rhythm of their months and years, the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the work they do, are terse, almost list-like, but all the more compelling for that.

Yet Agee's words still astonish. Read his description of the cotton fields ready for picking, look how he juxtaposes an image of light with an image of ugliness : "Late in August the fields begin to whiten more rarely with late blooms and more frequently with cotton and then still thicker with cotton, like a sparkling ground starlight; and the wide tremendous light holds the earth beneath a glass vacuum and a burning glass. The bolls are rusty green, are bronze, are split and burst and splayed open in a loose vomit of cotton . . . There is a great deal of beauty about a single burr and the cotton slobbering from it and about a whole field opening." The same is true of Evans' photographs. These faces lined with hardship, with work and starvation, still have in them a delicacy, a reflection of all that is human. Look at the photos of Floyd Burroughs and his wife, Allie May, look at their eyes. There is a sadness in his, a worn-out-ness, while hers still have a hint of the beauty she must once have been, a hint of humor, too.

We mustn't read this as history, though it was written more than 70 years ago. Things have improved, no doubt, for people like the Burroughs and the Fields and the Tingles. But our cities could use a team like Agee & Evans to document the social and economic injustices that have not been eradicated, but seem only to have become urban rather than rural. I call this "uncomfortable reading" because, if we are honest, we know that we cannot say "that's over and done with", and we must confront the failures of our current age.

* a note on this. Agee & Evans deliberately chose to focus on white families, because, as Agee says, "Any honest consideration of the Negro would crosslight and distort the issue with the problems not of a tenant but of a race . . ." show less

La mejor obra leída este año, por ahora. Difícil de superar, esta descripción de lo que supone la muerte de lo que amas en los que se quedan. Lo que hace la religión, a quién le sirve su consuelo y a quién no. Como vives la muerte si eres un adulto ya domesticado o si eres un niño en proceso de aprendizaje. La estructura de la obra con esos textos en cursiva, con todo lo que pasa por la cabeza de un niño de unos 7 u 8 años, situados donde el editor quiso ya que la obra estaba a show more medio rematar, no creo que varíen las intenciones del autor, que se salta una de las convenciones principales del escritor, no describas, muestra. Agee, no sé si por ser periodista, lo cuenta todo. Y aún así no es aburrido, ni pesado. Es sorprendete. Un milagro. show less

A beautiful, lyrical, poetic book that's simply a joy to read. Mainly taking place over a just few days, it paints a picture of a family before and after a much loved husband and father dies in a car accident. In addition, the book is a vibrant portrayal of 1915 Tennessee, when cars were beginning to take prominence in the cities and rural people still relied on horse power.

Much of the book is from the perspective of the son, Rufus, six years old at the time, who is a very observant and show more sensitive child, and very close to his father. Agee really puts us in the mind of a young boy trying to understand big concepts like death, religion, and his family's reactions to his father's death, in particular his mother's. Other perspectives are given and it feels like one of the themes is how we struggle to understand each other and, often unsuccessfully, try to decipher the thoughts of another.

The book intersperses almost stream of consciousness sections with straight-forward portrayals of scenes. Some of these are just stunning, such as in part 2 when Rufus's mother and great-aunt await news of her husband's accident and later her parents and brother sitting with her to console her. That the author can make these quiet, simple moments so engrossing, is amazing.

There has been some controversy over the years regarding how the book was edited as Agee himself died in 1955 before he could publish it. I can't imagine the book being much more perfect as is. It won the Pulitzer Prize, was adapted into a popular play and movie and has become beloved by generations of readers. show less