James Agee Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Why Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Still Gives People Trouble

I first picked up James Agee Let Us Now Praise Famous Men back in 2013 when a professor assigned it for a documentary writing seminar. Nobody in that class finished it. Not because it was bad, but because it does something most people don't expect from a Depression-era photo essay. It's not a clean documentarian exercise. It's a first-person breakdown happening alongside a series of photographs, and the two voices keep tripping over each other on purpose. The basic facts are easy enough. Agee spent three weeks in 1939 with photographer Walker Evans in Hale County, Alabama. They documented the life of three sharecropping families: the Allens, the McDillons, and the Ricks. The book was published in 1941 by Harper & Brothers. That's the surface. The actual reading experience is something else entirely.

Getting Your Hands on James Agee Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

The text is in the public domain in most jurisdictions, which means you can find free digital copies through Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. The Gutenberg edition strips out Evans' photographs, so if you're actually trying to study the work as a photographic essay, you need a printed copy or a PDF that includes the plates. The standard trade paperback from Penguin Classics or the W.W. Norton complete edition both include the full set of Evans photographs. I buy the Norton version because the binding actually survives being left open on a desk, and the photos are printed on slightly better stock than the cheaper editions. The book is structured in three major movements. The first is a substantial essay-length section where Agee writes in an extraordinarily dense, almost incandescent prose style about the moral and aesthetic problem of representing poverty. The second section contains the photo essays by Evans with minimal captioning. The third is a much more personal memoir section where Agee reflects on his own family history and his guilt about writing the book at all. What beginners miss is that the first section isn't traditional reportage. Agee is narrating his own internal struggle with the act of representation. He keeps stopping himself to say things like: "It is one thing to be poor, another to be portrayed as poor." He is essentially auditing his own conscience in real time while describing sharecroppers' lives. This is why the book feels exhausting. You are reading someone wrestle with whether he has the right to do what he is doing, and he never resolves the question satisfactorily.

I ran into a specific problem when I was working on a documentary project about rural displacement in the Delta region. I tried to model my approach on Agee and Evans' methodology, treating the first section as a straightforward framework for ethical fieldwork. It didn't work. The issue was that I assumed Agee was providing a usable method. He isn't. He's documenting the failure of any clean method to deal with the subject matter. When I stopped treating it as a manual and started treating it as a record of a consciousness struggling with its own complicity, the whole thing clicked into place. I restructured my entire project around that insight instead of trying to replicate their techniques.

Counter-Intuitive Points About the Book

Here's something that surprises people who haven't read it closely: the photographs are actually the more conservative part of the work. Evans photographs the families with a formal, almost neoclassical composition that dignifies his subjects. Agee's text is the radical element. The prose is overflowing with empathy that verges on overreach, and he keeps exposing the power imbalance between observer and observed. Most readers remember the photos and forget that the text is the provocateur. The common assumption that this is a straightforward collaboration between a writer and a photographer is wrong. Agee is doing the dangerous work. Evans is doing the careful work. Another point that gets missed: the book's title comes from the Book of Habakkuk, chapter 3, verse 13. "Thou wentest forth for the salvation of thy people, even with thine anointed; to wound the head out of the house of the wicked, and to lay him bare from thigh to neck." The original context is about divine judgment. Agee is applying it to the act of documenting poverty itself. He's suggesting that the observer, even with good intentions, is a kind of violent force entering someone's life. That framing is uncomfortable and deliberately stays uncomfortable throughout the entire book.

Where the Book Fails You

Let me be blunt about the limitations. Agee's prose in the first section is so dense and self-lacerating that it often becomes a barrier rather than a window. You will spend pages reading about his guilt without learning much concrete detail about the people he claims to be centered. The McDillon family, for example, gets far less narrative space than the Allens, and the Ricks are almost entirely absent from the text after the initial introduction. If you're looking for a balanced account of sharecropping life in 1930s Alabama, this is not that book. The photographs have their own problems. Evans shot on large-format sheet film and made glass plate negatives that were extremely expensive and time-consuming to produce. He only had the budget for a limited number of exposures per family. What you see is a carefully selected subset of moments, and Evans himself was deeply troubled by how his compositions could read as either dignified or exoticizing depending on the viewer. He destroyed many of the negatives after the project was completed. The surviving images are not a complete record of what he saw. They're a curated fragment. If your goal is understanding the economic mechanisms of sharecropping, read Arthur Ransome's reports on Alabama agriculture or the Farm Security Administration surveys from the same period. If you want a straightforward oral history format, go with the WPA slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers' Project. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is neither of those things. It is a record of one writer's inability to look away and his parallel inability to justify what he's doing about it.

A Practical Note on Reading It

The book is roughly 340 pages but the first section runs about 150 pages of extremely compressed prose. I've seen people read just the Evans photography sections and miss the point entirely, and I've seen people read just the text sections and think the photographs are decorative. They need to be read together, with the awareness that Agee is often writing against the grain of what the photographs show. The tension between them is the actual content of the book. Give yourself about four or five hours if you're reading straight through. It's not a quick book. The memoir section toward the end moves faster and is more personal, but it's also where Agee gets sidetracked into his own family history, which is fascinating if you're interested in him as a writer and irrelevant if you're just looking for information about Alabama sharecroppers. There's no wrong way to approach it, but there is a wrong expectation. This book doesn't comfort you. It wasn't designed to.