Fifty years later, a beautiful manuscript is shared

In the summer of 1936 James Agee, freshly out of college and a young staff writer at Fortune magazine, was sent to Alabama on an assignment to write a story about the conditions of tenant farmers. Because Agee’s unconventional approach to the story and his raw and realistic description of the deplorable conditions that these cotton farmers endured, Fortune never published the story. In 1941, Agee took his transcripts and the ideas from the Fortune assignment and published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book that rattled journalistic and literary style. James Agee poet, novelist, journalist, film critic, and social activist, would move on to lead an unorthodox, hard-driving life that would result in an early death at the tender age of 46.

Fifty years after the Fortune assignment, Agee’s original manuscript was uncovered and recently published in Cotton Tenants: Three Families. The story is accompanied by the stark and beautiful photographs by Walker Evans, who was on loan from the Resettlement Administration when he collaborated with Agee.

Agee’s writing and Walkers striking images offer a stunning revelation of three families who struggled to eek out a living in the hard scrabble conditions of the South during the Great Depression. Each chapter of the 224 page book addresses an essential component of life; Business, Shelter, Food, Clothing, Work, Picking Season, Education, Leisure, and Health.  The brief chapter titles suggest that Agee’s attempt was to present a very factual account of these farmers. But, what he did was provide facts that read like poetry. I felt myself drawn back into time and place where I could almost smell the scorched black coffee on the stove, feel the threadbare flours sacks that were reinvented into clothing, and feel the finger-numbing and back-breaking job of picking cotton.

This book is beautifully written and if you have even a glimmer of interest in this time period, I am confident that you will love it. In writing of three tenant families, Agee lifts up their lives and salutes them for living it with strength, integrity and humility.