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book
BookPrinted Material
Author Agee, James, 1909-1955.

Title Cotton tenants : three families / James Agee ; [photographs by] Walker Evans ; edited by John Summers ; preface by Adam Haslett.

Publication Info. Brooklyn, NY : Melville House, [2013]
©2013

Item Status

Location Call No. Status OPAC Message Public Note Gift Note
 Moore Stacks  HN79.A4 A5352 2013    Available  ---
Description 224 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm
Contents Business -- Shelter -- Food -- Clothing -- Work -- Picking season -- Education -- Leisure -- Health -- Appendix 1. On Negroes -- Appendix 2. Landowners.
Summary ""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'"--Publisher description.
Subject Agee, James, 1909-1955 -- Travel -- Alabama.
Agee, James, 1909-1955.
Travel.
Alabama.
Evans, Walker, 1903-1975 -- Travel -- Alabama.
Evans, Walker, 1903-1975.
Cotton farmers -- Alabama -- History -- 20th century.
Cotton farmers.
History.
Chronological Term 20th century
Subject Tenant farmers -- Alabama -- Hale County -- Social conditions.
Tenant farmers.
Alabama -- Hale County.
Social conditions.
Farm tenancy -- Alabama -- History -- 20th century.
Farm tenancy.
Cotton farmers -- Alabama -- Hale County -- Social conditions.
Hale County (Ala.) -- Rural conditions.
Alabama -- Rural conditions.
Rural conditions.
Agee, James, 1909-1955.
Added Author Evans, Walker, 1903-1975.
Summers, John, 1971-
ISBN 9781612192123 : $24.95
1612192122