Reviewed by Kelly Stewart

In 1936, a writer and photographer from Fortune magazine traveled to the Deep South to document the living conditions of tenant farmers in Alabama. James Agee (the writer) and Walker Evans (the photographer) spent several weeks immersed in the daily lives of three tenant farm families.

In the midst of the assignment, Fortune changed management, turned more conservative, and the magazine never ran Agee’s story. Five years later, Agee published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, accompanied by Evans’ stark photographs of the farmers. Agee’s complex and elegantly written book gives honor and dignity to the threadbare lives of tenant farmers and addresses Americans’ roles in their fate.

His goal in writing the book was to replicate the realism of Evans’ haunting photographs of the farm families. Several of Agee’s chapters document – in detail worthy of anthropological field notes – the farmers’ clothing, their homes, and their work. But what’s remarkable about the book is Agee’s talent with words. His poetic writing lifts the farmers up from their lives of squalor, turning their daily hardships into art: “and the breakfasts ended, the houses are broken open like pods in the increase of the sun, and they are scattered on the wind of a day’s work.”

Agee’s writing may be beautiful, but it is also full of rage as he describes the farmers’ inescapable cycle of poverty. More often, though, the rage is directed at himself. Although he aims to break away from the form and research methods of traditional journalism, he admits his discomfort with peering into the intimate lives of his subjects:

It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying…to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings…for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives … in the name of science, of “honest journalism.”

He repeatedly refers to himself as a spy, and an embarrassed one at that. Knowing how little the farmers earn, he feels guilty when they offer him—a Harvard graduate—meals and shelter. The ethical concerns that Agee explores in this book are still very much a part of the genre of literary nonfiction. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion writes, “Writers are always selling somebody out.”

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was published to grisly reviews. Time magazine called the book “the most distinguished failure of the season.” The New York Times called it “the choicest recent example of how to write self-inspired, self-conscious, and self-indulgent prose.” It wasn’t until a year after the book was published that the Kenyon Review gave it the praise it deserved: “[A] great book…full of marvelous writing which gives a kind of hot pleasure that words can do so much.”

During the civil rights movement, the book took on new life and is now regarded as a classic of literary nonfiction. Agee, who spent much of the rest of his career writing movie reviews and screenplays, didn’t live to see its success. He died of a heart attack at 45. His novel, A Death in the Family, won the Pulitzer Prize after his death. Today, writers like Barbara Ehrenreich — who immersed herself in the lives of the working poor to write Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America — continue in Agee’s tradition.

More than 60 years after its publication, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men continues to speak to readers with a social conscience who realize that hardworking men and women are still caught in webs of oppression.