false http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173064255m/243360.jpg 243360 16 Just what kind of book is <I>Let Us Now Praise Famous Men</I>? It <I>contains</I> many things: poems; confessional reveries; disquisitions on the proper way to listen to Beethoven; snippets of dialogue, both real and imagined; a lengthy response to a survey from the <I>Partisan Review</I>; exhaustive catalogs of furniture, clothing, objects, and smells. And then there are Walker Evans's famously stark portraits of depression-era sharecroppers--photographs that both stand apart from and reinforce James Agee's words. <p> Assigned to do a story for <I>Fortune</I> magazine about sharecroppers in the Deep South, Agee and Evans spent four weeks living with a poor white tenant family, winning the Burroughs's trust and immersing themselves in a sharecropper's daily existence. Given a first draft of the resulting article, the editors at <I>Fortune</I> quite understandably threw up their hands--as did several other editors who subsequently worked with a later book-length manuscript. The writing was contrary. It refused to accommodate itself to the reader, and at times it positively bristled with hostility. (What other book could take Marx as the epigraph and then announce: "These words are quoted here to mislead those who will be misled by them"?) Response to the book was puzzled or unfriendly, and <I>Let Us Now Praise Famous Men</I> sputtered out of print only a few short years after its publication. It took the 1960s, and a vogue for social justice, to bring Agee's masterwork the audience it deserved.<p> Yet the book is far more interesting--aesthetically and morally--than the sort of guilty-liberal tract for which it is often mistaken. On an existential level, Agee's text is a deeply felt examination of what it means to suffer, to struggle to live in spite of suffering. On a personal level, it is the painful, beautifully written portrait of one man's obsession. In its collaboration with Evans's photographs, the book is also a groundbreaking experiment in form. In the end, however, it is more than merely the sum of its parts. <I>Let Us Now Praise Famous Men</I> is, quite simply, a book unlike any other, simmering with anger and beauty and mystery. <I>--Mary Park</I> 1204501 1941 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men total:658|5:349|4:200|3:76|2:23|1:10| 658 2829 1100 83 5 5 false false Mon Feb 04 10:34:44 -0800 2008 Sun Apr 13 16:58:38 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 6 false false Sat Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2001 Thu Nov 27 18:45:48 -0800 2008 Thu Nov 27 19:08:59 -0800 2008 3 more...]]> 2 3 false false Fri Sep 21 07:42:41 -0700 2007 Sun Oct 14 14:22:14 -0700 2007 more...]]> 5 2 false false Thu May 22 17:31:23 -0700 2008 Thu May 22 17:34:57 -0700 2008 more...]]> 0 1 false false Tue Mar 25 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Mar 17 07:34:25 -0700 2008 Wed Mar 26 13:02:49 -0700 2008 more...]]> 3 0 false false Sat Nov 22 19:38:36 -0800 2008 Sat Nov 22 19:41:15 -0800 2008
Agee was scandalized by the minimal extent to which he felt a traditional artic...more...]]> 5 0 false false Tue Jul 14 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Jul 14 15:47:56 -0700 2009 Tue Jul 14 15:50:06 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Aug 17 18:23:43 -0700 2009 Thu Oct 08 19:49:03 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 0 false false Mon Jun 09 08:42:10 -0700 2008 Wed Jun 11 10:54:23 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 0 false false Thu Feb 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Wed May 23 17:38:43 -0700 2007 Wed May 23 17:50:24 -0700 2007
One ...more...]]> 2 0 false false Mon Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sun May 20 18:26:13 -0700 2007 Wed Oct 17 14:36:15 -0700 2007 more...]]> 4 0 false false Sat Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Wed Dec 19 09:40:05 -0800 2007 Wed Jan 02 16:43:51 -0800 2008 more...]]> 5 0 false false Wed Apr 22 12:45:04 -0700 2009 Wed Apr 22 13:23:15 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Sun Jul 12 10:14:21 -0700 2009 Sun Jul 12 10:17:45 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 1 false false Fri Dec 12 22:52:45 -0800 2008 Mon Dec 29 09:32:39 -0800 2008 more...]]> 5 0 false false Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 1996 Fri Feb 06 14:18:45 -0800 2009 Fri Feb 06 14:21:03 -0800 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Thu Mar 12 06:04:43 -0700 2009 Mon May 18 05:32:09 -0700 2009 Agee and the photographer Walk Evans intended ...more...]]> 5 0 false false Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 1990 Mon Sep 03 15:01:55 -0700 2007 Fri Sep 07 12:44:36 -0700 2007 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 ...more...]]> 3 0 false false Sat Jan 03 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sat Jan 03 13:39:55 -0800 2009 Sat Jan 03 13:42:26 -0800 2009 5 0 false false Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2004 Sat Feb 21 08:58:51 -0800 2009 Sat Feb 21 09:01:55 -0800 2009 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=243360