Agee, James and Walker Evans.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941. First edition. An exceptional copy of a book that usually turns up the worse for wear. Book Fine, faint tape-ghosts on the end papers, otherwise untouched. In a just about Fine dust jacket with slight rubbing to the spine ends and the spine perhaps one shade lighter than the front panel, but nowhere close to the spine fade that is usually seen. Housed in a standard buckram clamshell case.

“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” is the surprisingly striking product of a Fortune Magazine collaboration between photographer, Walker Evans, and writer, James Agee, in 1936. For four weeks they lived, worked alongside, and earned the trust of desolately impoverished sharecropping families in Alabama. Originally envisioned as a short article on sharecroppers in the Deep South amidst the reforms of President Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” Agee and Walker expanded the work considerably. Emotionally driven by the poverty they experienced, Agee and Walker crafted a fictionalized account of three families incorporating Evans’ powerful images. Despite a lukewarm initial reception, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” was brought to national attention by the social justice movements of the 1960s and has remained an important work of southern literature and an innovative collaborative work. Fine in about Fine dust jacket. (Item #1504)