Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, in Words and Photographs, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South
by James Agee
book data
426 ratings, 4.33 average rating, 54 reviews
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published
March 22nd 2000
(first published 1941)
by Houghton Mifflin
binding
Hardcover, 528 pages
isbn
0395957710
(isbn13: 9780395957714)
description
Just what kind of book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? It contains many things: poems; confessional reveries; disquisitions on the prop...more
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 653)
Reading this book is like hanging on to the back of someone on roller skates racing top-speed down a steep hill, with no brakes. There are few books that explore with such rigor the impossibility -- and necessary ideal -- of perfect perspective, or have the audacity to admit melancholy as an action (albeit an insufficent one), not just a solipsistic response to the aesthetic sufferings of others. The maddening ambivalence of this book, and its self-consuming doubt and belief in what it is doin...more
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This is the third time that I've attempted this book and I do not lay books down easily. The best way I can describe it is to say that it is like reading the teenage poetry of William Faulkner. There is much about this book that borders on genius, but far more that obscures. Agee tries so hard to get to The Truth that he ends up with a lot of contextual melodrama. As a result, the book is not so much the story of three tenant farming families so much as it is Agee's opinion of how the families c...more
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Read in September, 2001
One of the women who helped raise me was herself the daughter of a Cherokee sharecropper and his African American wife. Nannie did not read or spell very well. She stood six feet tall and had the most beautiful cheekbones I've ever seen on a woman in real life. She taught me the meaning of dignity and the power inherent in having a good and pure soul; she taught me how to properly watch a thunderstorm, which is to say, quietly and with respect.
When I read this book for the first time, in my...more
When I read this book for the first time, in my...more
In the summer of 1936 James Agee and Walker Evans traveled to rural Alabama to report on the lives of tenet farmers for Life Magazine. James Agee is a cocky and self obsessed but respectable and compelling dude.
Agee was scandalized by the minimal extent to which he felt a traditional article could communicate his experience in Alabama. He sought to provide sensory, intellectual, and emotional emergence in his experience. While some writers based their work on a political or social issue, Agee ...more
Agee was scandalized by the minimal extent to which he felt a traditional article could communicate his experience in Alabama. He sought to provide sensory, intellectual, and emotional emergence in his experience. While some writers based their work on a political or social issue, Agee ...more
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I think it easy to dismiss books that immediately come across as pretentious, bombastic and extravagantly lyrical, but works that manage to overcome the weight of being so deserve some recognition. Agee's master opus is one such book, to which I would add the novels of Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Wolfe. People tend to love or hate this nosebleeding level of lyricism, and I think as a reader it may be most important to decipher when exactitude and floridity in language is disingenuous and forced, ve...more
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Read in March, 2008
recommended to Anders by:
Sam
First published in 1941, James Agee's study of three Southern sharecropping families during the Great Depression sold a paltry six hundred copies. In the last few decades, however, the book has enjoyed increased interest and to date has been reprinted in a handful of updated editions. The book is packaged with about 30-40 black and white photographs taken by Walker Evans of the families described in the book meant to serve as a companion to the text, and in fact the book gives Evans co-authoring...more
Read in February, 2007
recommends it for:
writers, wonderers, human beings
This book is unlike any other book ever written: a dissection of everything that is American, man, artist, survival - done by looking at a few dozen photographs of the American South during the depression. You will learn about things that you did not know were there to be learned.
One of my favorite passages, from page 346:
"To this thirsting man, without warning or teasing of gradualness the sky became somber and opened its heart upon him, and stood itself forth upon the earth, an...more
One of my favorite passages, from page 346:
"To this thirsting man, without warning or teasing of gradualness the sky became somber and opened its heart upon him, and stood itself forth upon the earth, an...more
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Read in December, 2007
This book is the musings of James Agee about a short period of time he spend wandering Alabama and living with three tenant families there. It is complemented by some wonderful, compassionate and compelling photographs taken by Walker Evans. I must say that I had a difficult time getting through this book. It was one of the slower reads I've had in a long time. I kept getting lost in the language. Agee uses lots of colons and very little other punctuation; also he speaks in a highly descrip...more
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Read in January, 1990
What started out to be a Fortune mag story on the white slavery of the tenement farmers in the south turned into Mr. Agee's crazed obsession.
This is one of my favorite books of all time largely due to Walker Evans photos and the forward that he writes about his colleague.
Agee documents the hardships of these real-life characters in poetic detail. He gives whole chapters to "denim" and "cows". The importance of this book is not the characters however, but the true autobio...more
This is one of my favorite books of all time largely due to Walker Evans photos and the forward that he writes about his colleague.
Agee documents the hardships of these real-life characters in poetic detail. He gives whole chapters to "denim" and "cows". The importance of this book is not the characters however, but the true autobio...more
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This is a singular book. As a collaboration with the photographs of Walker Evans, it records the lives of four families of tenant farmers in Alabama during the Great Depression. But it is also an anti-documentary that resists the political leanings that characterized many depictions of the rural working class. Agee makes an ironically despairing effort to capture the very life-force of these tenant farmers with his words, denying the possibility to embody them with human language, but creating a...more
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This book makes me wish I studied American Lit instead of British, just so I could teach this text. The book is not merely an account of the lives of tenant farmers in the south, but also about Agee's struggle with his role as a journalist. The opening section, where he describes himself and Walker Evans as spies neatly dissects Agee's dilemma--how does one write a detailed account of human suffering without turning that suffering into a spectacle to be consumed by others? The rest of the book e...more
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Read in January, 1997
I'm tagging this one as "currently-reading" cause I never finished reading it-- I lost it. There is no doubt in my mind that this is perhaps one of the best American books written in the 20th century. A journalist, James Agee, had decided to chronicle the lives of dust bowl era families. Rather than transcribe interviews or retell stories he had heard, he chose to describe the material objects of their lives almost with cold detachment. However in reading these detailed descriptions, a...more
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Read in February, 2008
With the subject matter (tenant farming) very unique, it's definitely an interesting read. However, the writing style is extremely difficult and so descriptive at times that I lost track of the meaning completely. Agee also likes to wander off on literary tangents, which do make a strong point, but lack anything to do with the original subject of his book. After finishing this, I still really don't know if I understood what the book was trying to accomplish, aside from portraying tenant farming ...more
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Wow, this was a fascinating look at a white liberal writer's first trip into the pre-Civil Rights South. He took years to write this, but it is so intense it feels like he wrote the whole thing straight through.
The version I read had an introduction by some dude who explained reactions to the book over the last few decades, which I found fascinating. For example, the author never criticizes the people he meets--they are all just great. But I think that the reader can see the people throug...more
The version I read had an introduction by some dude who explained reactions to the book over the last few decades, which I found fascinating. For example, the author never criticizes the people he meets--they are all just great. But I think that the reader can see the people throug...more
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"Above all else: in God's name don't think of it as Art." (p. 12)
I expected to be delving this one piecemeal for the next several months, but once I stopped trying to patch together the who-is-who issues I was able to hook into Agee's point a lot more clearly. This book made me ask how much of our collective history is flat out unlearnable and unknowable. The driving argument about what truths can and cannot be tied to "Art" has given me something to chew on for the forsee
I expected to be delving this one piecemeal for the next several months, but once I stopped trying to patch together the who-is-who issues I was able to hook into Agee's point a lot more clearly. This book made me ask how much of our collective history is flat out unlearnable and unknowable. The driving argument about what truths can and cannot be tied to "Art" has given me something to chew on for the forsee
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This book recently topped my favorite list. I read it years ago but after re-reading it last week, I realize that this is the one book one should read, at least excerpts of, before going on any trip or before any writing of your own. This is the real deal when it comes to combining the authorial self-conscious voice with the authority to say "this is what I've seen." This is also one of the best books to show that everyone of privilege relies on the labor of those without.
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Read in January, 2004
recommends it for:
literary romantics and anthropologists
I read this first when I was in college, and it helped steer my path for many years, even if I came to an adult understanding only when I taught it in a college class a few years back. Some complain that the reporter intrudes on the story, but that is the point: the book tests the limits of seeing, the plausibility of objectivity, the power of words to represent unfamiliar experience. Many other things as well, but that's a start.
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I wanted to gouge my eyes out many, many times. I can't believe I even gave it 2 stars. Yes, it is a super famous book and has gotten all kinds of acclaim over the past 70 years or so. But James Agee drives me nuts. His writing style gave me a migraine. I did, however, keep the book and may attempt it again one day in the very distant future, once I have forgotten how much it bothered me the first go-round.
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Read in January, 1999
I read this in college and was incredibly intrigued by the extreme attention to detail that many find to be long and difficult in this book. I loved the detailed glimpse into the lives of these people. I loved the combination of the writing with the photography. I was able to see an exhibit of Walker Evans' photos at The Met in NY around the time I read the book.
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Read in August, 2004
recommends it for:
those who thirst for finite details of family life in the depression
I went into this book expecting something it definitely was not. I ended up enjoying it. I could read about details of "homes" during the depression in the south for hours on end. But, I never got a feel for the people in this book. Only the tangible. And something about that really... set me back. Though, still a good read and I am very glad to have read it!
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