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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book with text by American writer James Agee and photographs by American photographer Walker Evans, first published in 1941 in the United States.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men grew out of an assignment the two men accepted in 1936 to produce a Fortune magazine article on the conditions among sharecropper families in the American South during the "Dust Bowl". It was the time of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" programs designed to help the 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.
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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Previews available in: English
Subjects
History, Rural conditions, Farm tenancy, Fiction, Description and travel, Social conditions, Travel, Cotton farmers, Journeys, Fathers and sons, Social life and customs, Boys, Traffic accident victims, Description, Agricultural colonies, Haciendas agrícolas, Historia, Descripción y viajes, Arrendamientos, Tenant farmers, Pictorial works, Alabama, Erlebnisbericht, Familie, Baumwollanbau, Pächter, Alabama, social conditions, Fathers and sons, fiction, United states, social life and customs, fiction, Tennessee, fiction, American fiction (fictional works by one author), Foto'sTimes
20th centuryShowing 5 featured editions. View all 24 editions?
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Let us now praise famous men: a death in the family, & shorter fiction
2005, Library of America
in English
1931082812 9781931082815
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Let us now praise famous men: three tenant families
1988, Houghton Mifflin
in English
0395489016 9780395489017
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Book Details
Edition Notes
At head of title: Three tenant families.
"This volume is designed in two intentions: as the beginning of a larger piece of work; and to stand of itself, independent of any such further work as may be done ... The title of the work as a whole, this volume included, is 'Three tenant families"."--Pref.
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