Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Greensboro, Alabama

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" written by the writer James Agee with photographs by photographer Walker Evans was first published in 1941. The title is from a passage in the Wisdom of Sirach (44:1) that begins, "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us". The book grew (boy did it grow) from a simple assignment the two men accepted in 1936 to produce a magazine article on the conditions among sharecropper families in the American South during the "Dust Bowl." Fortune magazine never published the article. How could it? Agee included himself as a character in the narrative. In fact describing himself and agonizing over his role as "spy." He considered this article as a piece of a larger work and wrote would be "an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity". The photographs along were masterpieces of stark images that captured the poverty of the families that Agee wrote about. A production of two great artists, a masterpiece, a failure, an American icon.

Charles