Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a 1941 nonfiction book with text by the American writer James Agee and striking, black and white photography by the legendary photojournalist, Walker Evans. First conceived in 1936 as a Fortune Magazine article, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is an uncompromising look at the impoverished lives of Depression Era tenant farmers, struggling to make ends meet. The book had an enormous political and literary impact, reportedly inspiring Aaron Copland’s opera, The Tender Land and sparking The Wire creator David Simon’s interest in journalism.

Before the production of the book, Walker Evans had already begun photographing tenant farmers as part of a project launched by the US Government’s Farm Security Administration. Evans’s work with Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men concerns three families who go by pseudonyms to protect their anonymity. There’s the Gudger family, led by its patriarch George Gudger; the Ricketts family, led by Fred Ricketts; and finally, the Woods family, led by Thomas “Bud” Woods. The settings are all cities in Alabama, including Mills Hill, Moundville, Greensboro, and Tuscaloosa. But Agee uses pseudonyms for the settings as well, calling the cities Hobe’s Hill, Cookstown, Centerboro, and Cherokee City, respectively.

The story is not told from a purely journalistic standpoint. Rather, it often resembles a memoir for Agee who regularly recounts his personal struggle with being what he considers an outsider “spying” on these families and documenting their plight for, ostensibly, personal profit. The story, therefore, vacillates wildly between these two perspectives, sometimes being told strictly from the standpoint of the Gudger, Ricketts, and Woods families, and other times exploring the inside of Agee’s and even Evans’s heads.



Agee also intimately explores the suspicions of the writer-photographer team held by the families they are documenting. As such, Agee is acutely careful to avoid politicizing the families’ plight, instead, seeking to portray their daily routines and even the mundane aspects of their lives as honestly as possible.

Aside from Agee’s narration, Evans’s photographs often take center stage. For example, the first of the book’s two parts includes no words at all. Rather, there are sixty-two black and white photographs of the families with zero captions. This allows the reader to experience the lives of the tenants arguably more objectively without the unavoidable bias of the context Agee could have provided. Most of these photographs are simple portraits that include one or multiple family members. In most photos, the subjects wear unforgettable scowls that suggest the hardship they face daily. Their faces are thin and gaunt, reflecting the impending starvation they continually beat back by pushing their bodies to their limit in the hot Alabama sun. There are also shots of empty general stores with few products to sell and even fewer buyers, reflecting the utter poverty faced by the residents of these Alabama towns.

Book 2 contains Agee’s prose as opposed to just photographs. It is divided into three sections. The first is decidedly nonlinear and meditative, providing impressionistic portrayals of walking through the towns and interacting with local citizens. The next part contains somewhat more concrete language and is divided into smaller parts that focus on general topics of life, such as “Money” and “Shelter” and “Food.” These sections, in particular, make readers remember how much they take for granted. Most readers, unlike the trio of families documented here, do not wake up every day wondering how they will eat or whether they will have a roof over their heads when they lay down to sleep that night.



The third and final section of Book 2 is called “Inductions.” Perhaps ironically, considering it’s one of the last parts of the books, it includes portrayals of the initial meetings between the author-photographer team and the tenant farmer families, detailing how uncomfortable it was for Agee and Evans to endear themselves enough to the families to get them to trust the documentarians with sharing the intimate details of their lives with the rest of the world. Though it may seem counterintuitive to end the book with introductions, it powerfully undercuts the feeling of voyeurism that the reader feels when consuming the stark, context-free photos of the beginning of the book.
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While the book has had a huge impact for decades after its release, the initial response to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was highly muted. It only sold half of its initial publication run, for example, despite the interest in tenant workers sparked by both the novel and film version of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. It wasn’t until the 1960s and the increased political consciousness of the era that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men won the long-overdue praise it now enjoys in the popular consciousness.