On Writing Home with James Agee

By Beth Kephart

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—a book some think of as an extended poem and others consider a mystifying elongation of art journalism—recounts two summer months in 1936 when the photographer Walker Evans and the writer James Agee travel south to prepare an article on the lives of sharecroppers. Seeking to observe the daily rhythms of an “average” family, Agee becomes deeply acquainted—spy like, he says—with three particular families, including those he calls the Gudgers. He b...