Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969. Octavo, slick black cloth (hardcover), silver letters, [64] plates + 471 pp. Near Fine, with light foxing (age darkened spotting) to page edges; in a Very Good, mylar protected dust jacket with edgewear. From dust jacket: In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans were sent on a journalistic assignment to discover and disclose the actual daily lives of typical sharecropper families in the South. They found and lived with three families for one month, and put together words and photographs that were eloquent, original, and devastating. (Here in this time; on this vast continental sorrowful clay I see you, encamped, imprisoned; each iiin your pitiably decorated little unowned ship of a home...”). They were describing a mode of life -- in our rural slums -- that was unthinkably remote and tragic. It was only by the most extreme violence and realism that they could hope to make the world aware of it. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was immediately hailed by some as cruel, repetitious, crazy; by others as fresh, intensely moving, overwhelming, accurately poetic writing. The rhetoric in the first and last sections is suggestive of Melville’s description of the death grapple of Ahab with the White Whale. The middle section is, as the authors say, “the beginning of an attempt, as exhaustively as possible to record and examine a peice of unimagined human consciousness... with nothing, however trivial, left out.” It is a list, an incantation of facts, a camera moving through rooms; it is a search for the human and religious meaning of these people’s lives: their waking, sleeping, eating; the work; the illiteracy; their houses, children, animals; and their helpless endurance.... in the original edition thirty-one pictures -- just half the number Walker Evans intended to publish -- were printed. Now the full complement of photographs is appearing. If most professional photography is dominated by the commercial stance or the artistic posture, Evans is in recoil from these. his work might even be said to have brought photographic style back around to the plain, relentless snapshot. In this sense the pictures in this book amount to a technical and psychological adventure.