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Three Families
Melville House
June 2013
On Sale: June 4, 2013
224 pages
ISBN: 1612192122
EAN: 9781612192123
Kindle: B00ALB4X4M
Hardcover / e-Book (reprint)
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Non-Fiction Photography | Non-Fiction
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 “most realistic and most important
moral effort of our American generation.”
The
origins of Agee and Evan's famous collaboration date back to
an assignment for 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 marked Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
and for years the original report was lost.
But fifty
years after Agee’s death, a trove of his manuscripts turned
out to include a typescript labeled “Cotton Tenants.” 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 Evans’s historic photos,
Cotton Tenants is an eloquent report of three
families struggling through desperate times. Indeed, Agee’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 “a
poet’s brief for the prosecution of economic and social
injustice.”
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