James Agee

an article from Harvard Magazine about James Agee:

http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/05/vistas-perfection

Yet even here, Agee managed to snatch a kind of victory from the jaws of defeat. For if he hadn’t gone to work at Fortune, he would not have been assigned to write an article on the dire condition of white Alabama sharecroppers; and if it were not for that assignment, he would not have found the subject of his strangest, most important book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee’s editor paired him with Walker Evans, the photographer, and while the two men were enthusiastic about the assignment, they drove south not knowing exactly what to look for or where they would find it.

Agee’s revelation came when he decided to spend three weeks actually living with the cotton-farming Burroughs family in their primitive shack, getting to know them and their neighbors, the Tingle and fields families. Suddenly he was no longer writing a magazine article about a socioeconomic problem; he was undergoing something very like a spiritual ordeal, in which he was granted a vision of the infinite value of each individual human being, even or especially the poorest. It is no wonder that when Agee returned to New York and tried to write about the experience for Fortune, the draft he produced was immediately rejected by his editor.

This rejection liberated Agee to turn the article into a book. It would take five years before Let Us Now Praise Famous Men finally appeared, in August 1941—partly because of legal complications with various publishers, partly because of Agee’s own compulsive rewriting of the manuscript. The delay meant that Agee missed whatever commercial opportunity he might have had—the agricultural depression had given way to the war as the major issue of the day.

Photograph by Walker Evans, courtesy of the Library of Congress

Walker Evan’s iconic image of the Fields family.

Photograph by Walker Evans, courtesy of the Library of Congress

Walker Evan’s iconic image of Floyd Burroughs from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

But while the book Agee produced is still usually referred to, even today, as an exposé of agricultural poverty—a How the Other Half Lives for the Cotton Belt—that is true of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men only in the sense that Walden is a book about pond ecology. In fact, Agee’s book is a long meditation on the difficulty of capturing reality in language, on the incomparable uniqueness of the individual soul, on the prison of American materialism—much the same themes that inspired the transcendentalists a hundred years before.