Cotton Tenants: Three Families

Cotton Tenants: Three Families

A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographer

In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a four-hundred-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama at the height of the Great Depression. The book shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Critic Lionel Trilling called it the â€œmost realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.â€

The origins of Agee and Evan's famous collaboration date back to an assignment forÂ Fortune magazine, which sent them to Alabama in the summer of 1936 to report a story that was never published. Some have assumed that Fortune's editors shelved the story because of the unconventional style that markedÂ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and for years the original report was lost.

But fifty years after Ageeâ€™s death, a trove of his manuscripts turned out to include a typescript labeled â€œCotton Tenants.â€ Once examined, the pages made it clear that Agee had in fact written a masterly, 30,000-word report for Fortune.

Published here for the first time, and accompanied by thirty of Walker Evansâ€™s historic photos, Cotton Tenants is an eloquent report of three families struggling through desperate times. Indeed, Ageeâ€™s dispatch remains relevant as one of the most honest explorations of poverty in America ever attempted and as a foundational document of long-form reporting. As the novelist Adam Haslett writes in an introduction, it is â€œa poetâ€™s brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice.â€

Co-Published with The Baffler magazine
Country USA
Manufacturer Melville House
Binding Paperback
ReleaseDate 2014-09-19
EANs 9781612193984

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Melville House
Binding	Paperback
ReleaseDate	2014-09-19
EANs	9781612193984

Cotton Tenants: Three Families

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