Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book with text by American author James Agee and photographs by American photographer Walker Evans, first published in 1941 in the United States. This work documents the lives of poor tenant farmers during the Great Depression. While this is in line with Evans' work with the Agricultural Security Administration, the project was started not by the FSA, but by Fortune magazine. The title comes from a passage in the Wisdom of Sirach (44: 1) which begins, "Let us now praise the famous, and our father who begot us."
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Let Us Now Praise The Famous Men grew out of the duties that Agee and Evans received in 1936 to produce the Fortune article about the conditions among South American tiller families during " Dust Bowl ". This is the time US President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" program is designed to help the poorest segment of society. Agee and Evans spent the eight weeks of the summer studying their work, especially among three white-share families mired in miserable poverty. They returned with Evans's obscene image portfolio - families with skinny faces, adults and children huddled in empty huts before dusty yards in the Depression era in the faraway south - and Agee's detailed record.
As he puts it in the preface of this book, the initial task is to produce "verbal photographs and notes from everyday life and the environment of the average white tenant farmer's family". However, as the Literary Encyclopedia shows, "Agee finally considers this project to be the work of several volumes entitled Three Tenant Families, even though only the first volume, Let Us Now Praising the Famous Men , ever written ". Agee considers that a larger work, albeit based on journalism, would be "an independent inquiry into a certain normal difficulty of human divinity".
Maps Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Agee as a character
Agee, writing simple and self-conscious about his special position in book making, emerged as his own character at moments in the narrative, as when he suffered for his role as a "spy" and an intruder into this humble life. At other times, when he only enrolls the contents of a farmer's sharecropping shack or the few clothes they should wear on Sundays, he is not at all. The weird sequence of books and chapters, titles ranging from ordinary ("Clothes") to "artistic artistic" (as the New York Times says), Agee's immediate plea for readers to see humanity and grandeur from this terrible life, and his suffering with the thought that he can not accomplish the assigned task, or should not, because of the extra suffering it inflicts on his people, is part of the book's character.
Impact
Scholars have noted that the ambitious scale and rejection of books on traditional reporting run parallel with the US government's creative and non-traditional programs under Roosevelt. Agee argues with literary, political, and moral traditions that may mean nothing to his people but which is important for a larger audience and a larger context to examine the lives of others.
Let Us Praise Famous Men only sells half the press after publication, but has since won high praise for years and is regularly studied in the US as a source of journalistic and literary innovation. Reading the book inspired Aaron Copland to write his opera, The Tender Land . David Simon, journalist and creator of the popular television series, The Wire, praised the book that affected early in his career and told journalism practices.
Although the book is presented as a documentary and "true", the images are actually somewhat submitted, due to technical and aesthetic reasons, leading to the current controversy over the truth of the historical record. This is common in photography of this period.
Pseudonym
Throughout the book, Agee and Evans use pseudonyms to obscure the identity of three families of tenant farmers. This convention is maintained in the 1989 follow-up book by D. Maharidge and M. Williamson And Their Kids After Them: Inheritance "Let us now praise the famous" Ã:: James Agee, Walker Evans, and Rise and the Fall of Cotton in the South. But the photos of Evans that were archived at the Library of Congress of the American Memory Project had the original name of the subject of photography.
* There is disagreement about whether the family name is spelled correctly Tengle or Tingle. The Spelling of the Library of Congress is used here.
Radio adaptation
In 1966, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired dramatic features for 135 minutes, Let's Praise the Famous People , George Whalley's adaptation of this book. The broadcast was produced by John Reeves, who has written about radio production.
References
External links
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Houghton Mifflin (2001). ISBNÃ, 0-618-12749-6
- Fortune Magazine ' s David Whitford returns to Hale County Alabama
- Maharidge, D. and Williamson, M. (1989). And their children after them: inheritance Let's now praise the famous people. New York: Pantheon. 1990 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
- A Grand Lady and Some Famous Men - A few brief notes on the sequel, with modern photographs, by Marion Military Institute Archivist
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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