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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

by James Agee, Walker Evans

4.19 · rating details · 1,155 ratings · 142 reviews

A landmark work of American photojournalism “renowned for its fusion of social conscience and artistic radicality” (New York Times) In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event whe...more

Paperback, 432 pages

Published August 14th 2001 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (first published 1941)

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Apr 13, 2008

Emily rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: my-very-very-favorites, hard-to-say, essays-and-or-assorted-criticism-an, photography

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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Nov 27, 2008

Meredith rated it

· review of another edition

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, i...more

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Oct 14, 2007

amanda rated it

· review of another edition

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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May 22, 2008

Leonard rated it

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Shelves: politics

It took me forever to get around to reading this, but boy, am I glad I did. It's a moving and incredibly heartfelt look at the suffering of the poor during the Depression (and a rather effective defense of FDR's reaction to it), and one of the most deft blends of fiction and journalism I've ever read.

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Jan 30, 2011

Dominic rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: classic-literature, favorites

In summer 1936, James Agee and photographer Walker Evans went to spend a few months in Alabama amongst three tenant farmer families. Their goal was not necessarily to report or even understand these "beautiful" men and women, but to render them on the page in such a way that it does justice to their brillance, their largeness. The result is one of the most sensitive, pained, compassionate, utterly human pieces of writing I've ever read, second maybe only to Walt Whitman's Leaves of G...moreIn summer 1936, James Agee and photographer Walker Evans went to spend a few months in Alabama amongst three tenant farmer families. Their goal was not necessarily to report or even understand these "beautiful" men and women, but to render them on the page in such a way that it does justice to their brillance, their largeness. The result is one of the most sensitive, pained, compassionate, utterly human pieces of writing I've ever read, second maybe only to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, who was one of Agee's literary "fathers."

Agee's prose is full of exhausting labyrinthine sentences and strange punctuation, and it requires patience. The book is an unusual blend of genre that gives no lip service to the "normal" way nonfiction books are written. Agee, who is wrestling with the nature of reality and art and the paradox of "honest journalism," is trying to create a whole new genre. It is probably a failed effort, but it is also quite possibly the most beautiful literary "attempt and failure" ever published.

There is a lot of warning on this site to read Agee in small doses. I can understand this advice, but I must disagree. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is best read in long, extended sittings. Walker Evans, in the 1960 preface, spoke of night as Agee's time, and so he advises to read Famous Men at night. I second his suggestion.

My expectations for this work weren't especially high, but it turns out that Agee and Evans' book is one of the most powerful reading experiences of my life. It is not just the dazzling efforts of a master writer (which it is) nor a painfully close look at a part of history I know very little (which it is as well). Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a document of two young men's quest to give name to the desire of each and every human individual to be acknowledged and to acknowledge, to be recognized and to recognize, to be seen and to see, to be valued and respected, to value and respect. To Agee and Evans, strangers should not stay strange. We must learn how to challenge ourselves to look into the lives of every human being and interact with all in such a way that honors their dignity and inherent beauty.

This book has already changed my life. I urge you all to read it, one day.(less)

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Mar 26, 2008

Anders added it · review of another edition

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...moreFirst 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 credit. The book came out of a trip taken by Evans and Agee in 1936, when they traveled to the South in an old car full of photographic equipment to live for a few weeks with sharecroppers, to be able to understand their day-to-day realities. They set out to get the full experience of the people they were studying, to fully immerse themselves in their reality. They slept wherever there was room -- a bedbug-infested lumpy old cot, an old car seat ripped out of a car and moved onto a porch; and they ate what their subjects ate, however gross or tasteless. Their shock at these conditions comes through, rippled with admiration and respect. Agee infuses this respect and admiration into his writing of the book, and seeks to do these people justice by writing about their situation as honestly and accurately as possible.

The book straddles many different genres, and the end product can be described as a poetic take on ethnography. Oscillating between highly-detailed personal narrative and impressionistic prose-poem, this book is beguiling and hard-to-follow, to say the least. Agee struggles (to put it mildly) with questions of privilege, truth, empathy, social justice. However, the way he writes this struggle is so overwrought, so labored, that it quickly stumbles into a painful, inaccessible verbosity. Boiled down his thesis would be something like: "these people are so beautiful that it hurts me and literary convention can't possibly contain this pain."

Poetry readers may enjoy Agee's knack for rich description: his prose is proto-Beat in its frenzied rush, its mixture of the fantastic and the ordinary, the colorful swirls of compelling personal narrative, his heartbreaking sensitivity to the plight of the people he's studying. Like his contemporary e.e. cummings, Agee also has a knack for reclaiming the rules of syntax and structuring. But a successful prose-poem does not make a successful ethnography, and ultimately, as such, the book is a failure.

Seeking to truly understand and render for his audience the experience and character of these three families, Agee is faced with the ethnographer's dilemma of trying to see and present the subject free of the preconceptions and biases of the observer. By and large his approach is too concerned with documenting the physicality of the families, including a chapter where he seeks to describe every object in every room of one of the families' small house. When he does look deeper into the character of his subjects, he does it with highly depersonalized, overly sexualized physical observation. But even then he remains distant from them. He extrapolates their thoughts and concerns as they barely make eye contact with him, at most making stilted efforts at politeness. The difference between them and Agee is so great, yet rather than try to seriously broach this divide, Agee explodes into pages of pastoral descriptions of their farms and clothing. Yet beneath all this intricate detail, it is obvious that his retreat to his (considerable) writing skills is due to his acute frustration at not being able to do more.

In this way, Agee neglects ethnography's bread and butter: interpersonal relationships, religious beliefs, community dynamics, shared histories, among others. He mainly shows the people he's studying in terms of their possessions. Discussion about the people themselves is glaringly shallow, and often highly, frustratingly filtered through his idiosyncratic personal lens.

P.S. I don't think I'm going to put a number on this one, just because strangely anything between 1 and 5 seems accurate to me.(less)

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Jul 25, 2010

Kate Savage rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

I know this book is critically acclaimed. It just really didn't work that well for me. The book is about a trip James Agee (Harvard-educated journalist for Forbes at the time) and Walker Evans (photographer) take to backwoods Alabama to see what the lives of sharecroppers are like. I don't think I'm ruining anything if I tell you this-their lives are hard. Harder than most people could imagine. Agee does an amazing job at describing the families he meets with. Evans' pictures are stark but soft....more

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Jul 18, 2010

Dottie rated it

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Shelves: 2010, ocitylibrary

This info describes the OC Library copy which I'm reading:

Cover: mud gray green with the title left margin reconciled like so:

Let
Us
Now
Praise
Famous Men

with black lettering except the word Praise which is white -- authors name lower right above Photograpsher Walker Evans name

Hardcover; 471 pp

Copyrights 1939, 1940 James Agee; 1941 James Agee and Walker Evans; 1969 Walker Evans. Third Printing Riverside Press Cambri...more

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Feb 07, 2012

Ben Dutton rated it

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Writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans received assignment in 1936 to produce a magazine article on the lives of sharecroppers in the US south. Three years into President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” – a sequence of economic planning aimed at alleviating unemployment in America – and Agee and Walker were billeted with three families in the south, and told to write their stories and take a few photographs. Over this eight week assignment Agee began to envisage a deeper story, a larger series o...moreWriter James Agee and photographer Walker Evans received assignment in 1936 to produce a magazine article on the lives of sharecroppers in the US south. Three years into President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” – a sequence of economic planning aimed at alleviating unemployment in America – and Agee and Walker were billeted with three families in the south, and told to write their stories and take a few photographs. Over this eight week assignment Agee began to envisage a deeper story, a larger series of writings, and began the first of a planned trilogy, entitled Three Tenant Families, of which Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is the first and only volume.

The book sold poorly upon its publication in 1941 – estimates say about 600 copies – and it was not until a 1960 reissue, following Agee’s untimely death, that its genius was recognized. In many ways Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book before its time – it anticipates the change in journalistic writing that would occur in the 1960s with Norman Mailer.

James Agee, a notorious hell raiser in Greenwich Village, a man enamored with city life, with the fast life, seemed a strange choice for such an assignment, but in July 1936 he found himself, with Walker Evans in the “house” of a taciturn Alabama family, whom he called the Gudgers. These were simple people, living in a house open to the elements, with no running water or electricity, families that received land off the landowners in exchange for their work in bringing in the cotton crop each year. It was a tough work, work that paid poorly, and left those indebted to such a lifestyle with nothing. The families Agee meets are dressed in clothing made out of flour sacks and passed down the generations. They often go barefoot because they cannot afford shoes. The portrait Agee paints of these people is not a maudlin one, it is not a judgmental tone he adopts, or one of sympathy – Agee simply tells it as it is, sometimes in great detail. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men stands as one of the most well documented of studies, the perfect resource if one ever wished to recreate such a life, for everything is here, from the decoration of their homes, to the style of the clothes, to the dust on the step.

Only to achieve all of this, Agee does not always use prose. In a book that uses poetry, prose and photographs to build up its resonant image, the portrait of these families becomes more wholly complete than in anything else I have ever read. The families come alive. They breathe through Agee & Walker’s work, they live still. We are in this land with them.

“Here I must say, a little anyhow: what I can hardly hope to bear out in the record: that a house of simple people which stands empty and silent in the vast Southern country morning sunlight, and everything which on this morning in eternal space it by chance contains, all thus left open and defenseless to a reverent and cold-laboring spy, shines quietly forth such grandeur, such sorrowful holiness of its exactitudes in existence, as no human consciousness shall ever rightly perceive, far less impart to another: that there can be more beauty and more deep wonder in the standings and spacing of mute furnishings on a bare floor between the squaring bourns of walls than in any music ever made: that this square home, as it stands in unshadowed earth between the winding years of heaven, is, not to me but of itself, one among the serene and final, uncapturable beauties of existence: that this beauty is made between hurt by invincible nature and the plainest cruelties and needs of human existence in this uncured time, and is inextricable among these, and as impossible without them as a saint born in paradise.”

Okay, so at times he is overly-wordy, overly enthusiastic – and any section like this taken without the context of what has come before it might not work – but Agee’s work is a hymn to this life, its parts, in becoming a whole, become magnificent.

This is not to say that it is a book without flaws, because it does have some. There is a moment early on in his book where he describes an incident: he and Walker Evans were photographing a church and a black couple walk past. Agee goes after them to ask about the church and the couple panic, obviously fearing attack, and Agee understands at last the tensions that ripple throughout the south. It is a vivid moment in a book full of them, but instead of continuing in this vain he begins to detail, in great length, the minutiae of the homes – 30 pages on clothing, 40 on education (or lack of it), and though all of this is necessary, during it one wishes to feel people in this narrative, for it becomes almost a museum piece, the life drained out of it. However, come alive it does, during part three of the book known as “inductions” – when Agee describes meeting the families for the first time and his first road trip alone into the south. The writing here is experimental at times, and Agee’s work comes soaring to life: The beginning:

“Down in front of the courthouse Walker had picked up talk with you, Fred, Fred Ricketts (it was easy enough to do, you talk so much; you are so insecure, before the eyes of any human being); and thee you were, when I came out of the courthouse, the two of you sitting at the base of that pedestal wherefrom a brave stone soldier, frowning, blows the silence of a stone bugle searching into the North; and we sat and talked; or rather, you did the talking, and the loudest laughing at your own hyperboles, stripping to the roots of the lips your shattered teeth, and your vermilion gums; and watching me with fear from behind the glittering of laughter in your eyes, a fear that was saying, ‘o lord god please for once, just for once, don’t let this man laugh at me up his sleeve, or do me any meanness or harm’ (I think you never got over this; I suppose you never will); while Walker under the smoke screen of our talking made a dozen pictures of you using the angle finder (you never caught on; I notice how much slower white people are to catch on than negroes, who understand the meaning of a camera, a weapon, a stealer of images and souls, a gun, an evil eye): and then two men came up and stood shyly, a little away; they were you, George, and you, Mr. Woods, Bud; you both stood there a little off side, shy, and taciturn, George, watching us out of your yellow eyes, and you, Woods, quietly modeling the quid between your molars and your cheek; and this was the first we saw of you:”

I could quote the whole chapter. Just from that we know Fred and Bud and George, we know this time, this town, this life. It is a piece of writing full of stunning work, of great images: the tight menace of a diner in an unfamiliar town for an unfamiliar man; the sun, cutting through the sky, and the heat; and a nighttime in one of these cabins, being bit at by bedbugs and peeing into the open night.

One of the great sadness’s of Agee’s work is that he knows he cannot help these families. He is simply and observer; the recorder of their life, a man who will know them and leave them, but that they will “outshine the sun”. Let Us Now Praise Men remains a masterpiece of American letters, and one of the greatest works of non-fiction, and throughout it these simple people remain alive and glorious.(less)

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Aug 03, 2011

Seamus Thompson rated it

· review of another edition

This is quite possibly the most honest book ever written. It is certainly the most honest piece of journalism. An eloquent, devastating, beautiful exploding of the ridiculous notions that 1) journalism can ever be objective and 2) that attempting to capture the essence a human being through Art is ever anything but reductive.

I see that other reviewers have complained that the book does not fit into a given genre, that it is not a clean piece of work, that it is as much about Agee...more

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Jul 30, 2011

Christopher Sutch rated it

· review of another edition

This quite unusual and remarkable book highlights both the advantages and the detriments of a modernist artist writer (and another photographer) attempting to engage in a work of sociological fieldwork. Agee's prose is utterly beautiful and well-crafted, and the modernist conventions he adopts in structuring and composing his ethnography of Alabama tenant farmers in 1936 was surprisingly successful in revealing details and knowledge about the conditions of their day to day life (even if, as Agee...moreThis quite unusual and remarkable book highlights both the advantages and the detriments of a modernist artist writer (and another photographer) attempting to engage in a work of sociological fieldwork. Agee's prose is utterly beautiful and well-crafted, and the modernist conventions he adopts in structuring and composing his ethnography of Alabama tenant farmers in 1936 was surprisingly successful in revealing details and knowledge about the conditions of their day to day life (even if, as Agee notes several times, he considered this volume to be only the first of several that would be necessary to complete the work; the others were never published, probably not even composed). His artist's eye for detail and his understanding of how to convey meaning through words is both sharp and subtle; he even has several stretches of the narrative in which he becomes self-reflexive about the hopelessness of conveying ANY information using the media available to him in any sort of adequate way (a feature that, generally speaking, is missing from more straightforward anthropological or sociological works). Agee is also surprisingly, even shockingly, honest and self-aware of the psychosexual and power dynamics involved in intimately living with and observing his subjects, and astute in connecting these elements to particular events in his own childhood development that make this endeavor almost unbearable erotic for him. This last, in some ways, is the most interesting (and at the same time deeply disturbing) feature of the text. These are the marvels of this work. Ultimately, however, it is impossible to not see, as Agee himself does, that the task he set himself, to depict the day-to-day life of tenant farmers for a mostly northern, urban audience, fails horrendously. There simply is no plausible way to bridge the gaps in culture, class, race, etc. that stand in the way. Agee's necessary attempts to literally do this in order to become acquainted with his subjects, as depicted in the text, are painful and embarrassing to read. Yet he and his photographer should be given extremely high marks for even making the attempt; this they felt necessary because of their marxian politics, and it is admirable that such an attempt was made and that, even in its failure, it should result in a wonderfully written, thoughtful, and haunting book.(less)

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Apr 07, 2011

Lisa N rated it

· review of another edition

This is unquestionably one of the most unique books I have read. In 1936, Agee and Evans were assigned to report on tenant families in the cotton belt. They traveled to Alabama and lived with three sharecropper families for about a month. Evans’ now iconic Depression-era photographs were shocking, revealing “a mode of life—in our rural slums—that was unthinkably remote and tragic.”

Agee used an experimental writing style, combining complex literary passages, journalism, and poetr...moreThis is unquestionably one of the most unique books I have read. In 1936, Agee and Evans were assigned to report on tenant families in the cotton belt. They traveled to Alabama and lived with three sharecropper families for about a month. Evans’ now iconic Depression-era photographs were shocking, revealing “a mode of life—in our rural slums—that was unthinkably remote and tragic.”

Agee used an experimental writing style, combining complex literary passages, journalism, and poetry: “I must say to you, this is not a work of art or of entertainment.” I don’t understand exactly what he was trying to do. He says, “This is a book about ‘sharecroppers’ and is written for all those who have a soft place in their hearts for the laughter and tears inherent in poverty viewed at a distance.”

One thing I got out of reading this is the power of words to convey images beyond anything in a photograph. Agee tries to capture the feelings, the odors, the lack of sanitation, the desperation, the hopelessness. Verbal imagery really has an effect on me. Some of the imagery was downright repulsive—like the vivid descriptions of sores on the animals and the vermin with which they live.

But other passages struck a chord—describing the bed—“It is unmade and is flung over with a wrecked quilt nearly dead-gray with dirt, the dark, crudded cotton leaking from its wounds.”

“Near the corner opposite the table is a large, very old, nearly unmanageable, and almost inconceivably foul stove, stacked with unwashed pans; and next this is a broken table whose unpainted wood surface is coal black and on which the biscuit dough is made.”

“They live in a steady shame and insult of discomforts, insecurities, and inferiorities, piecing these together into whatever semblance of comfortable living they can, and the whole of it is a stark nakedness of makeshifts and the lack of means: yet they are also, of course, profoundly anesthetized.”

He spends literally pages describing their scant, primitive clothing—corn-shuck hats, fertilizer sack dresses—with exhaustive detail—one ‘dress’ was “held together with a snarl of shoelace.”

Agee says, “The Beethoven piano concerto #4 IS importantly, among other things, a ‘blind’ work of ‘nature,’ of the world and of the human race; and the partition wall of the Gudgers’ front bedroom IS importantly, among other things, a great tragic poem.” I have pondered this passage more than any other. In one section he describes their shelter as a scab on a diseased community. While I can conceive of certain passages (like the crudded cotton leaking from the wounds of the quilt above) as being tragic and poetic, there is far too much realism in poverty for me to think of it as poetic in any sense.

Agee probes into every inch of their meager, shabby existence, even down to inventorying the contents of their drawers and rubbish. I found this very disturbing and exploitive and feel it displays a deep irreverence for human dignity. Whatever his intent, the work as a whole comes across to me as brutal and cruel.

The tediousness became unbearable, and I was only able to read about 320+ of the 471 pages. I will be happy to send this book back to the library.(less)

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Jul 14, 2009

Lauren rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, favorites

I was, I think, fourteen, perhaps fifteen when someone I can't recall handed me a book, called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The 'someone' was a woman, older than I, and I vaguely recall we were sitting in a kitchen, drinking tea. I have an image of wooden floors, a pot-bellied stove, sagging bookshelves, and a red and white checkered plastic table cloth. I can't for the life of me imagine where this might have been, or who this woman might have been and I suspect I am superimposing the scenes a...more

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Nov 09, 2011

Michael rated it

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Shelves: non-fiction

The very interesting and important story Agee has to tell about tenant farmers and sharecroppers is hindered by his ulterior motives in writing this book, namely to stick up his finger at the literary establishment and the very concept of documentation. His book is more literary philosophy than social documentary.

Notes:

Agee's introduction is gratuitous in its apology and arrogance, so much so that it makes the start of the book rather uncomfortable. Agee's observations are ...more

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May 08, 2010

Joan Colby rated it

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This book vacillates between an extended prose poem and a documentary. The first section contains both while the second part beginning with “Money”, which readers may find more accessible, is mostly straightforward non-fiction centered on the plight of impoverished tenant farmers in Alabama during the 1930’s. Walker Evans’ famous photos accompany the text and portray just how very poor these folks were. Today’s American poor are hard to distinguish as they dress similarly in faux designer attire...more

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Apr 10, 2011

Shannon rated it

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I went into this book thinking it was a documentary type novel about the plight of tenant farming in the deep south, and it some ways it was. However, most of it was not about the families so much as Agee's experience with the families. A subtle but important difference. Most of the book was about how he felt being around them and how they affected him. He presented a highly romanticized version of desperately poor people while including seemingly random stories (like his desire to "get a p...more

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Jun 15, 2010

Laure Parkinson rated it

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The book is about the process of writing, or more aptly, documenting. Through Agee’s own sense of shame, a tone that permeates the book, he questions the ability to “honestly” record encounters. He highlights the impossibility of capturing a single moment and preserving its integrity; and he realizes that when a writer attempts to do so, he imposes emotions, interpretations, and assimilates it to things he derives from his own experience.

Your medium, unfortunately, is not a still or ...moreThe book is about the process of writing, or more aptly, documenting. Through Agee’s own sense of shame, a tone that permeates the book, he questions the ability to “honestly” record encounters. He highlights the impossibility of capturing a single moment and preserving its integrity; and he realizes that when a writer attempts to do so, he imposes emotions, interpretations, and assimilates it to things he derives from his own experience.

Your medium, unfortunately, is not a still or moving camera, but is words. You abjure all metaphor, symbol, selection and above all, of course, all temptation to invent, as obstructive, false, artistic. As nearly as possible in words (which, even by grace of genius, would not be very near) you try to give the street in its own terms: that is to say, either in the terms in which you (or an imagined character) see it, or in a reduction and depersonalization into terms which will as nearly as possible be the ‘private,’ singular terms of that asphault…which in important ways is at the opposite pole from your intentions, from what you have seen, from the fact itself. (207-8)

Because of this, he attempts to describe events, people, and places as if they were cubist paintings; and in bringing these angles to the forefront, and selecting which parts to emphasize or leave out, he begins the unavoidable selective process. The same is true with the function of the camera, both in the story and in conjunction with it. The book makes us realize how unavoidable art is an attempt to communicate, and how it holds just as much falseness as truth, and just as much truth as fabrication.

And there is something Romantic and yet entirely ignorant about the way he describes these tenant farmers. He envies their inseparable connection to nature, he finds such beauty in the simple symmetry of their lives, in the fact that they work to live and live to work. Yet, he says they need and want nothing they have ever tasted, and glancing at their most precious objects, I see a desire in them for something more. And these are our two perceptions at odds with some objective reality that we can’t weed out.

I do the book no justice in quoting parts from it (as I have done), because in reading the entire work, one realizes the obsessive intentions of Agee in juxtaposing seemingly random images, memories, and thoughts. If anything, though, this is the newfound Agee in me talking.(less)

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Sep 01, 2010

Tony rated it

· review of another edition

Well I managed to finish this just to say I'd read this so called classic,but the whole thing just annoyed the hell out of me. Talk about obscure writing, this guy was taking the mickey out of his readers.
And that's annoying. Very.
This from page 226 of the version that I read:-

"No doubt we overvalue the difference between life and lifelessness, but there is a certain difference, just as, in the situation we are speaking of, a difference is remarkable: the difference ...more

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Jan 11, 2012

Sarah rated it

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This book is unclassifiable, only marginally readable, and absolutely beautiful. Agee and Evans (who took the photographs for the book) approach their subject matter (three rural American families living in abject poverty during the great depression) with extraordinary honesty. Agee works very hard to offer an objective portrait of his subjects, drawing their surroundings and the conditions in which they live in excruciating detail. He is, at the same time, sensitive to his own position as a wri...more

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Feb 21, 2011

Claire rated it

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Shelves: nyu-crc

There is something romantic and timeless about Walker Evans' photographs featured in this collection (what else could it be called). Agee, though, is a different story.

Here, he is dissatisfied with the constraints of fiction, journalism, and writing in general. In Agee's mind, it all fails to encapsulate reality.

His writing, often poetic and pregnant with alliteration, at times reads like Jack Kerouac's On the Road: too many adjectives, not enough periods. The reader's at...moreThere is something romantic and timeless about Walker Evans' photographs featured in this collection (what else could it be called). Agee, though, is a different story.

Here, he is dissatisfied with the constraints of fiction, journalism, and writing in general. In Agee's mind, it all fails to encapsulate reality.

His writing, often poetic and pregnant with alliteration, at times reads like Jack Kerouac's On the Road: too many adjectives, not enough periods. The reader's attention begins to in this volume, especially towards what Agee describes as the "anticlimactic" final sections (the part that comes after his insufferable "Intermission").

Agee is best either as a poet (pg. 17-19) or as an ethnographer (pg. 101-106). When he blends the two he inserts apologies and regrets that make this book read like an all-text version of Post Secret.

Reading this volume it is easy to be reminded of a line from The Kids Are All Right: "If you want a family so damn bad," says Annette Benings's character, "go out and make your own." Instead, Agee decides to be an interloper in three sharecropper homes, where he vascillates between long soliloqulies on the "heroic" nature of farmers and berating the lifestyle, living arrangements, culture, and speech. One family has a side porch "littered and in one corner stacked high with lard tins, mule shoes, broken pieces of machinery and tools, and all such things as cannot properly be called junk because they are here in the idea that a use will be found for them," he says. Heads up, homie. It actually, probably, is trash. Farmers are really good at stacking shit up.

Later, he writes, "almost no one in the rural and small-town south lives 'well' or 'handsomely'" (181). No shit, Sherlock. Here's another news flash: you don't have to cross the Mason-Dixon lines to find that out. I bet there were poor folks not far from Cambridge, MA, where you attended undergrad, but that does not make as exciting a story. In any case, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men strikes as a go-out-and-seek-my-fortune narrative for a writer who wanted an "experience." (Had he lived in our decade he would be a big fan of those $10,000 trips to build wells in Honduras.) The product, however, stinks with the same sort of self-righteous blather that so often returns home with global volunteers.

Furthermore, the narrative is practically colonialist. This reads with the same uninspired plot of Pocahontas. Agee moves in, learns about life, shares googly-eyes with a local girl, leaves more "knowledgable" with renewed belief in his own culture. Agee writes, "they have also, the deep storm fear which is apparently common to all primitive peoples." At times, too, his persona is confusing. When he is judging the people, he writes in third person; when he talks about farm work, he drifts into second: "the brilliant weight of heat is piled upon you more and more heavily in hour after hour so that it can see you are a diving bell whose strained seams most at any moment burst..."

Oh, Agee, you're so proletariaty. Saying "we are your friends" to the families over and over before inner-monologing about the stink and the filth. In this respect, Agee comes off like one of the middle class revolutionaries George Orwell derides in The Road to Wigan Pier: disaffected bourgeoisie who will ultimately abandon their "communist" ideology in favor of comfort.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book I have wanted to read for a very long time. The timeless black-and-white of Evans's photographs mentally file this book away with the images Dorothea Lange's captured for the Works Progress Administration. Where Lange's and Evans' photographs succeed, Agee's words fail. Sharecroppers in the American South needed their story to be heard; unfortunately, this isn't it.
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Aug 30, 2010

Professor rated it

· review of another edition

Probably the first book of literary journalism I ever read. Agee showed me that any life, no matter how humble, can be worth examination and can be fascinating. He showed me the way in which language choices determine our attitudes toward a subject, and the way in which it actually in a sense creates the subject. He writes here about the poorest tenant farmers in the post-Depression South, and he brings alive the poignancy of their situations, their desire for beauty and meaning even amidst thei...more

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Jan 26, 2010

Vildan Arıcan rated it

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Agee, I love that guy...u know what, normally I hate history and boring staff like documentary in terms of writin...however, he also reflects himself in the book even tries to make u see how he had a hard time gettin that post to document about American lives during Great Depression. he is gorgeous!!! he gives an example, if u are listenin Bethooven, do not do that while eatin, drinkin...make the radio louder and come closer...it is hurtin is not it? so that is sth. It shows u have feelings and ...more

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Dec 18, 2009

Ebh rated it

I read this for my MFA class and led the discussion on it. While there are a lot of uncomfortable elements to Agee's writing, what he did was really revolutionary. I also appreciate his honesty and thoroughness. Some of the book reads more like poetry than prose, and the punctuation (or lack thereof) is very experimental. It is not the kind of book that is easy to read straight through, but dipping in anywhere is rewarding. Walker Evans' accompanying pictures are haunting, too, and add another l...more

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Dec 13, 2011

Blayze rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: american-literature, the-american-south

On page 15, towards the end of the Preamble, Agee writes:

Get a radio or a phonograph capable of the most extreme loudness possible, and sit down to listen to a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or of Schubert's C-Major Symphony. But I don't mean just sit down and listen. I mean this: Turn it on as loud as you can get it. Then get down on the floor and jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly as possible, and not movi...more

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Apr 17, 2011

Alison rated it

· review of another edition

The most powerful, complex, beautiful, genre-busting, and overwhelming book I've read since Moby-Dick. A real behemoth of a tome, crossed with some moral journalism, crossed with some wordplay reminiscent of, of all the darnedest, inscrutable, provocative things, Tender Buttons (but with some very contemporary thinking about animals and objects). I had a hard time the first time I picked this up, several years ago; this time around, I resolved to think about it as modernist poetry, and slowed ...moreThe most powerful, complex, beautiful, genre-busting, and overwhelming book I've read since Moby-Dick. A real behemoth of a tome, crossed with some moral journalism, crossed with some wordplay reminiscent of, of all the darnedest, inscrutable, provocative things, Tender Buttons (but with some very contemporary thinking about animals and objects). I had a hard time the first time I picked this up, several years ago; this time around, I resolved to think about it as modernist poetry, and slowed the hell down in my reading, to try to absorb it sentence by sentence. A must-read for writers who are interested in the ethics and aesthetics of representation (this is not a book about tenant farmers, but a book about--insofar as it can be said to be "about" any one thing, or even several--how to choose to represent, or not to represent, people who are tenant farmers, and one's own guilty conscience about doing so). To close, here is a more-scrutable-than-usual excerpt about that process:

"It may, however, be added: words like all else are limited by certain laws. To call their achievement crippled in relation to what they have tried to convey may be all very well: but to call them crippled in their completely healthful obedience to their own nature is again a mistake: the same mistake as the accusation of a cow for her unhorsiness. And if you here say: 'But the cow words are trying to be a horse,' the answer is: 'That attempt is one of the strongest laws of language, just as it is no law at all so far as cows are concerned.' In obeying this law words are not, then, at all necessarily accusable, any more than in disobeying it. The cleansing and rectification of language, the breakdown of the identification of word and object, is very important, and very possibly more important things will come of it than have ever come of the lingual desire of the cow for the horse: but it is nevertheless another matter whenever words start functioning in the command of the ancient cow-horse law. Human beings may be more and more aware of being awake, but they are still incapable of not dreaming; and a fish forswears water for air at his own peril."

Coda: academics may find this easier going than the lay reader will.(less)

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Aug 16, 2010

Dree rated it

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Shelves: constant-reader, 2010-reads, classics, library-books-2010, memoir-biography-autobiography, the-south

I can't believe I got through an undergrad degree in American history and 2 years as a master's student in American history without ever reading even excerpts of this book.

I very much liked reading the parts about how the tenants and their families live--and how the families are so different in personality, hopes for the future in their kids (school, public appearance). I was a history major for a reason, and this interests me.

I also, though, enjoyed Agee's rambling thoughts ...more

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Sep 29, 2010

Hazel rated it

· review of another edition

Recommended to Hazel by: Meredith

Shelves: non-fiction, never-finished

Agee had an extraordinary ability to see beauty in the despised and the overlooked. At times his emotional response to poor black and white tenant farmers is so powerful as to leave him inarticulate. At other times his prose is exquisite.

They were young, soberly buoyant of body, and strong, the man not quite thin, the girl not quite plump, and I remembered their mild and sober faces, hers softly wide and sensitive to love and to pleasure, and his resourceful and intelligent wit

...moreAgee had an extraordinary ability to see beauty in the despised and the overlooked. At times his emotional response to poor black and white tenant farmers is so powerful as to leave him inarticulate. At other times his prose is exquisite.

They were young, soberly buoyant of body, and strong, the man not quite thin, the girl not quite plump, and I remembered their mild and sober faces, hers softly wide and sensitive to love and to pleasure, and his resourceful and intelligent without intellect, and without guile, and their extreme dignity, which was as effortless, unvalued, and undefended in them as the assumption of superiority which suffuses a rich and social adolescent boy; and I was taking pleasure also in the competence and rhythm of their walking in the sun, which was incapable of being less than a muted dancing, and in the beauty in the sunlight of their clothes, which were strange upon them in the midle of the week.

The young man's eyes had the opal lightings of dark oil and, though he was watching me in a way that relaxed me to cold weakness of ignobility, they fed too strongly inward to draw to a focus: whereas those of the young woman had each the splendor of a monstronce, and were brass. Her body also was brass or bitter gold, strong to stridency beneath the unbleached clayed cotton dress, and her arms and bare legs were sharp with metal down. The blenched hair drew her face tight to her skull as a tied mask; her features were baltic. The young man's face was deeply shaded with soft short beard, and luminous with death. He had the scornfully ornate nostrils and lips of an aegean exquisite. The fine wood body was ill strung, and sick even as he sat there to look at, and the bone hands roped with vein; they rose, then sank, and lay palms upwards in his groins. there was in their eyes so quiet and ultimate a quality of hatred, and contempt, and anger, toward every creature in existence beyond themselves, and toward the damages they sustained, as shone scarcely short of a state of beatitude; nor did this at any time modify itself.

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Oct 23, 2011

Kelly rated it

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i really liked the beginning with his analysis of the "curious" type of journalism he was doing and what his hopes were in writing the work--"that the reader will be edified, and may feel kindly disposed toward any well-thought-out liberal efforts to rectify the unpleasant situation down South, and will somewhat better and more guilty appreciate the next good meal eats" (14); however at about 100 pages i had to put it down. it just wasn't doing it for me and lately i feel li...more

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Jul 27, 2010

Molly rated it

Recommended to Molly by: Referenced in "The Help"

Shelves: non-fiction

Let us now praise the fact that I have finished this book! It took me a month of pecking and absorbing and discarding and revisiting to get through it. A long, strange trip it was stylistically and unlike any journey I've taken before. Let me tell you about it.

James Agee makes Faulkner look clear and concise. He loves nothing more than to ramble on and explore every possible tangent his mind's discovery takes him. And he discovered a lot while living among a cluster of tenant fa...moreLet us now praise the fact that I have finished this book! It took me a month of pecking and absorbing and discarding and revisiting to get through it. A long, strange trip it was stylistically and unlike any journey I've taken before. Let me tell you about it.

James Agee makes Faulkner look clear and concise. He loves nothing more than to ramble on and explore every possible tangent his mind's discovery takes him. And he discovered a lot while living among a cluster of tenant farming families in Alabama in 1936. He shares intricate details of his eye's view of their homes, their land, their features, their mannerisms. He shares absolutely beautiful vignettes of what the experience felt like to him as he interacted with folks or observed things from afar. He also shares every single thought to cross his mind, whether they have anything to do with the topic at hand or not.

For some, this experience - and it is truly an experience - is enlightening, thought provoking, mind blowing. For others it is mind numbing, eye glazing and a total bore. For me, it was all of the above. There were times I was sick and tired of listening to Agee's endless diatribes, opinions and strange allegories. There were times I was sucked in to the scenes he brought to life - I could smell, taste, feel his surroundings. Photographer Walker Evans took some striking photos that stand strongly on their own. But Agee's gift in the details is that he enhances these images with his words to the point of almost being able to crawl into them comfortably.

In the end, the reader is rewarded for their diligence and stubborn attitude with beautiful moments of writing. His ramblings show the man inside the account and bring honesty and basis for his overwhelming emotion for the plight of poverty. He focuses on beauty, dignity and the tireless human spirit to survive - even when the circle seems pointless. You don't leave this book feeling pity. You leave feeling thankful for the moments he shared. And annoyed for all the babble it took to get there.(less)

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Oct 08, 2009

Julianne rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: David Buth

Recommended to Julianne by: Neil Postman

Shelves: non-fiction

If this book review were to become so long that I would need chapter- and sub-headings, and if my chapter- and sub-headings turned out to be things like “(On the Porch: 1,” “Colon,” and “Intermission: Conversation in the Lobby,” and if I were to set some of them—but not others—off with left parentheses, and punctuate some—again, not others—with colons tending towards nothing but a thereafter empty page, you would think (aside from “Wow, this review is horribly and strangely long”) that I’d compl...more

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About James Agee

An American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.

Life
Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, at Highland Avenue and 15th Street (renamed James Agee Street in 1999) to Hugh James Agee and La...moreAn American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.

Life
Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, at Highland Avenue and 15th Street (renamed James Agee Street in 1999) to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler. When Agee was six, his father died in an automobile accident. From the age of seven, he and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in boarding schools. The most influential of these was located near his mother's summer cottage two miles from Sewanee, Tennessee. Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys was run by Episcopal monks affiliated with the Order of the Holy Cross, and it was there that Agee's lifelong friendship with an Episcopal priest, Father James Harold Flye, began in 1919. As Agee's close friend and spiritual confidant, Flye was the recipient of many of Agee's most revealing letters.

Agee went to Knoxville High School for the 1924–1925 school year, then travelled with Father Flye to Europe. On their return, Agee moved to boarding school in New Hampshire, entering the class of 1928 at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, he was president of The Lantern Club and editor of the Monthly where his first short stories, plays, poetry and articles were published. Agee was admitted to Harvard University's class of 1932. He was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Advocate.

In 1951 in Santa Barbara, Agee, a hard drinker and chain-smoker, suffered the first two in a series of heart attacks, which ultimately claimed his life four years later at the age of 45. He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, New York.

Career
After graduation, he wrote for Fortune and Time magazines, although he is better known for his later film criticism in The Nation. In 1934, he published his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage.

In the summer of 1936, Agee spent eight weeks on assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans living among sharecroppers in Alabama. Agee turned the material into a book entitled, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). It sold only 600 copies before being remaindered.

In 1942, Agee became the film critic for Time and, at one point, reviewed up to six books per week. Together, he and friend Whittaker Chambers ran "the back of the book" for Time. He left to become film critic for The Nation. In 1948, however, he quit both magazines to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for Life Magazine about the great silent movie comedians, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon, which has been credited for reviving Keaton's career. As a freelance in the 1950s, he continued to write magazine articles while working on movie scripts, often with photographer Helen Levitt.

Agee was an ardent champion of Charlie Chaplin's then extremely unpopular film Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which has since become a film classic. He was also a great admirer of Laurence Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet, especially Henry V, for which he actually published three separate reviews, all of which have been printed in the collection Agee on Film.

Legacy
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, ignored on its original publication in 1941, has been placed among the greatest literary works of the 20th Century by the New York School of Journalism and the New York Public Library.(less)

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Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, Shorter Fiction

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