Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - (Collected Works of James Agee) 2nd Edition,Annotated by Hugh Davis (Hardcover)

About the Book

A thoroughly annotated edition of the Agee-Evans masterpiece, featuring invaluable explanatory notes as well as notes comparing the published work to extant copies of the original manuscript and a wealth of additional material.

Book Synopsis

In the summer of 1936, writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans, on assignment
for Fortune magazine, went to central Alabama to document the lives of three white
sharecropper families. Agee's editors killed the article, and after a torturous five-year
struggle to do artistic justice to the material, the author finally published it in book form
as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, only to see it sink with barely a ripple. The posthumous
revival of Agee's literary fortunes led to the work's reissue in 1960, its adoption as an unofficial
bible by civil rights workers, and its enshrinement as an American classic. It has
remained in print ever since.

In this, the third volume in The Works of James Agee series, editor Hugh Davis not
only offers a thoroughly annotated edition of the Agee-Evans masterpiece, featuring invaluable
explanatory notes as well as notes comparing the published work to extant copies of the
original manuscript, but also supplements that text with a wealth of additional material: an
insightful critical essay, variant versions of key sections, unused chapters, correspondence
between Agee and others involved in the book's publication (notably Houghton Mifflin editor
Robert Linscott), generous selections from the author's notebooks, and much more. This
volume opens with the original gallery of Evans's thirty-one photographs from the 1941
edition and also includes, as part of the supplementary material, the expanded gallery of
sixty-two photos that appeared in the 1960 edition. Here as well is the text of the rejected
Fortune article, "Cotton Tenants," fully annotated for the first time.

Informed by Agee's love of his subjects, his acute observational skills, and his poetic,
passionate, raging voice--not to mention the stark artistry of Evan's black and white photography
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book that to this day defies easy classification.
This volume recaptures the aesthetic impact of the original, corrects errors from earlier
editions, and, most important, illuminates the difficult process that spawned its creation.

Review Quotes

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men provided a document of the Great Depression, a moral touchstone for the Civil Rights Movement, and a literary model for the New Journalism. Hugh Davis's expertly crafted new edition is certain to become the definitive text for Agee's non-fiction masterpiece, providing invaluable cultural context in his critical essay, and equally important textual variants and unseen materials from the Agee archives. When readers want to understand the 'Spirit of the Age' for mid-century America, Hugh Davis's edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is the book they should reach for first." --Jesse Graves, author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine

"Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is the Moby Dick of nonfiction. Both masterpieces have elements of the style and tone of fiction and of the information and tone of nonfiction. Hugh Davis has put together all the components that went into the making and remaking of Agee's epic subjective saga. Solidly scholarly on the loftiest level, this compilation may be read in the spirit and with the effect of one's reading of the first published version--Agee's profound exploration of various kinds of perspectives on what he saw and felt in Alabama." --David Madden

About the Author

Hugh Davis is an associate professor of English at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia. He is the author of The Making of James Agee and coeditor, with Michael A. Lofaro, of James Agee Rediscovered: The Journals of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Other New Manuscripts, both published by the University of Tennessee Press.
James Agee (1909-1955) was an American writer in mutliple genres. As a journalist, he pioneered serious film criticism. As a novelist, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his posthumously published A Death in the Family. As a screenwriter, he worked on revered films The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter.
Walker Evans (1903-1975) was a photographer, most famously for the Farm Security Administration, for whom he worked from 1935 until 1938. His works include American Photographs, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Many Are Called.