Walker Evans, James Agee

A first edition copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

• James Agee (American).
• Photographs by Walker Evans (American).
• Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1941.
• 471 pages.
• Octavo.
• Includes black-and-white photographs printed in relief halftone.
• Bound in black cloth-covered boards, titles stamped on spine in silver, in a photo-illustrated dust jacket.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men chronicles the lives of three sharecropper families in Alabama during the Depression. Its origins lie in a 1936 assignment for Fortune magazine, which James Agee only accepted on the condition that Walker Evans accompanied him as the photographer. Evans was granted leave without pay from his role with the Resettlement Administration (precursor of the Farm Security Administration) for July and August of that year, with the understanding that while Fortune would have first refusal on this set of photographs, they would ultimately, as was the case with all work Evans undertook for the Resettlement Administration, belong to the United States government.

Fortune ultimately decided not to run the story and released it to Agee and Evans. In the spring of 1938, they reached an agreement with Harper and Brothers to expand the same material into book form. But, after a year and a half of discussions, Agee's refusal to change the text resulted in the withdrawal of the publishing offer. The project languished until Houghton Mifflin of Boston stepped in on the condition that Agee remove certain words that were illegal in Massachusetts. A suite of Evans's direct, unadorned photographs precede Agee's inventive stream-of-consciousness prose. The book was well received, but sales were poor; only around 600 copies were sold in a year and it was remaindered. In the Winter 1942 issue of the Kenyon Review, Lionel Trilling described Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as being "the most important moral effort of our American generation."