Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

A groundbreaking work of literature, journalism and photography, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book with text by American writer James Agee and photographs by American photographer Walker Evans published in 1941 in the United States. The title is from a passage in Ecclesiasticus that begins, "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us."

Related Topics:
James Agee - Walker Evans - Ecclesiasticus

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The book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men grew out of an assignment the two men accepted in 1936 to produce a magazine article on the conditions among sharecropper families in the U.S. south. It was the time of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" programs designed to help to poorest segments of the society. Agee and Evans spent eight weeks that summer researching their assignment, mainly among three white sharecropping families mired in desperate poverty. They returned with Evans' portfolio of stark images--of families with gaunt faces, adults and children huddled in bare shacks before dusty yards in the depression-era nowhere of the deep south--and Agee's detailed notes.

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As he remarks in the book's Preface, the original assignment was to produce a "photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers." However, as the Literary Encyclopedia points out, "Agee ultimately conceived of the project as a work of several volumes to be entitled Three Tenant Families, though only the first volume, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was ever written." Agee considered that the larger work, though based in journalism, would be "an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity."

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The resulting single book is a critically praised opus that lept over the traditional forms and limitations of even the best journalism of the time. By combining factual reportage with passages of literary complexity and poetic beauty, Agee presented a complete picture, an accurate, minutely detailed report of what he had seen coupled with insight into the author's feelings about the experience and the difficulties of capturing it for a broad audience. In doing so, he created an enduring portrait of a nearly invisible segment of the American population.

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Although Agee's and Evans' work was never published as the intended magazine article, their work has endured in the form in which it finally emerged, a lengthy, highly original book. Agee's text is part ethnography, part cultural anthropological study, and part novelistic, poetic narrative set in the shacks and fields of Alabama. Evans' black-and-white photographs, starkly real but also matching the grand poetry of the text, are included as a portfolio, without comment, in the book.

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Although at its heart a story of the three families, the Gudgers, Woods, and Rickets, the book is also a meditation on reporting and intrusion, on observing and interfering with subjects, sufficient to occupy any student of anthropology, journalism, or, for that matter, revolution.

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Agee is a character himself at times in the narrative, as when he agonizes over his role as "spy" and intruder into these humble lives. At others times, as when he simply lists the contents of a sharecropper's shack or the meager articles of clothing they have to wear on Sunday, he is althogether absent. The strange ordering of books and chapters, the titles that range from mundane ("Clothes") to radically artistic (as the New York Times put it), the direct appeals by Agee for the reader to see the humanity and grandeur of these horrible lives, and his suffering at the thought that he cannot accompish his appointed task, or should not, for the additional suffering it inflicts on his subjects, are all part of the book's character.

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Scholars have noted that the book's ambitious scale and rejection of traditional reporting runs parallel with the creative, non-traditional programs of the U.S. government under Roosevelt, which attempted to preserve the dignity of poor families while helping lift them from dirt-poor scrabbling existence, but also risked paternalism and subjugation. In ways both obvious and less so, Agee argues with literary, political, and moral traditions that might mean nothing to his subjects but which are important for the larger audience and the larger context of examining other's lives.

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There's little doubt that the length and setting, the unusual language and forms employed by Agee, make Let Us Now Praise Famous Men a challenging book. Nevertheless, it has won high praise over the years and is routinely studied in U.S. as a source of both journalistic and literary innovation and inspiration.

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The latest edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2001 (ISBN: 0618127496, Paperback; 432 pages).

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