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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 โmost realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.โ
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 Ageeโs death, a trove of his manuscripts turned out to include a typescript labeled โCotton Tenants.โ 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 Evansโs historic photos, Cotton Tenants is an eloquent report of three families struggling through desperate times. Indeed, Ageeโs 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 โa poetโs brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice.โ
 Media BuzzAll Things Considered - August 29, 2013
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