Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families
Posted by admin | Posted in D-F Books | Posted on 03-08-2010
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Product Description
Agee’s colleague at Time in the 1940s, John Hersey, writes a major evaluation of Agee’s work and the Agee legend in a new introduction to this literary classic. 64 pages of photos.Amazon.com Review
Just what kind of book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? It contains 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 Partisan Review; 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.
Assigned to do a story for Fortune 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 Fortune 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 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 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.
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. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, quite simply, a book unlike any other, simmering with anger and beauty and mystery. –Mary Park
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families
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The eloquence of composition surely necessitated infinite use of superlatives and verbs, resulting in a requisite painstaking remostrance to the reader, thus fettering the effusion and disembogulation of the document. In other words, wouldn’t it have been better to just leave all of the fluff out of the book and just write as if the reader is someone other than the Queen of England? If you can weed through all of excessive use poems and verbs, it’s a halfway decent book
Rating: 3 / 5
A wonderful book. Agee is an Ameriacn original
Rating: 5 / 5
I can scarcely recall a time when I did not want to read this book. In fact in february of 1996 I read And Their Children After Them, by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, which is a 1989 sequel to Let Us Now Praise, and examines what happened to the people Agee tells us about in this book, and their children. After reading this, I now want to again read what became of the people Let Us Now Praise led us to come to know so intimately. For many pages of this book reading it was a drag, and only my rigid rejection of the “right” of a reader to quit reading a book he has started caused me to continue reading. But in time I became glad I was reading it. The minute listing of every item in a room did not entrance me, but the cumulative effect of the recital of rural poverty accomplished its aim, Agee has his share of nutty ideas, but they do not overly detract from what he is telling us about Alabama in 1936. I am glad I read the book, and I will have to again look at And Their Children After Them.
Rating: 4 / 5
The Walker Evans photograpy is indeed remarkable, but Agee’s thick prose is deathly dull, and at times it seems he is only down there to ogle the women.
Rating: 3 / 5
Yes, Agee has an exceptional ability to use language. Yes, this novel is a “must read” for anyone interested in Depression-Era literature. No, it is not a good book, precisely for the same reason it is frequently recommended, namely, it’s language.
Agee is understandably distressed by the inability of language to adequately express the plight of the families he portrays. However, he does not merely acknowledge this and move on, he rather writes an entire book about his inability to write. For someone interested in theory this might be interesting, but for someone interested in better understanding tenant farmers in the early 20th century, this is not the place to go. Although his intentions may be good, Agee’s angst becomes primary in the text, even to the point of superseding the families’ troubles. In the end, Agee is more concerned with how he is affected by his subject than by his subject in and of itself. See Orwell’s THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER for a superb treatment of a similar topic.
Rating: 2 / 5