Wow! I finally broke down and listened to the audiobook which was only available through an Audible free trial. I have tried to read this book four times! It is a photo essay and a written work, but I could not get through it, even after watching a documentary on YouTube about the process of writing this book and the biography of the author. But, the book in audio is art! I can see why Mustich included it.
Interesting that I talked to my mother-in-law on Christmas Day about being poor in Poplar Bluff, Missouri in the same years (the 1930s). These people were even poorer than my mother-in-law.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
In the summer of 1936, Fortune magazine commissioned James Agee and Walker Evans to report on the lives of sharecroppers in the Deep South. Agee was a twenty-six-year-old journalist who’d published a volume of poems two years earlier; Evans was a thirty-two-year-old photographer. The assignment took them to Hale County, Alabama, where they spent eight weeks with three families of tenant farmers. Fortune chose not to run the article that resulted from Agee’s and Evans’s two-month stay, but in 1941 a more significant record of their collaboration finally saw the light: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a landmark volume of photographs and prose that has since been recognized as one of the most remarkable books of the twentieth century.
