Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee
List: $22.95 | Sale: $16.07
Club: $11.47

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Three Tenant Families

Author: James Agee

Narrator: Lloyd James

Unabridged: 15 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/05/2016

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included

Synopsis

A landmark work of American photojournalism “renowned for its fusion of social conscience and artistic radicality” (New York Times)In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was first published in 1941.This unsparing record of place, of the people who shaped the land, and the rhythm of their lives is intensely moving and unrelentingly honest. Recognized today by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, it stands as a poetic tract of its time.With a bonus PDF of Walker Evans’s classic images, reproduced exactly as they are in the print edition, this book offers a window into a remarkable slice of American history.

About James Agee

James Agee (1909–1955) is the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the renowned study of Alabama sharecroppers during the Depression. Born in Tennessee, he died two years before the publication of A Death in the Family, his best-known work and winner of the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

About Walker Evans

Walker Evans (1903–1975), best known for his work during the Depression, was born in St. Louis and began his photographic career at twenty-five. He served as an editor for Fortune and was a professor of graphic arts at Yale.

About Lloyd James

Sean Pratt is a professional narrator, actor, and voiceover artist who has over twenty-five years of experience. He has recorded over seven hundred audiobooks and has received numerous Earphones Awards and Audie Award nominations. For the last ten years, he has been helping actors, both students and professionals, to understand the complexities of the business as well as reinvigorate and refocus their careers.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Cody on December 19, 2017

Very few books can knock me like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Originally commissioned as a report back to the Northern seaboard’s intellectua-lites on the state of Southern affairs, ‘reporter’ Agee did something no one saw coming (including himself): he fell in love. In love with the people he live......more

Goodreads review by amanda on October 14, 2007

This is the third time that I've attempted this book and I do not lay books down easily. The best way I can describe it is to say that it is like reading the teenage poetry of William Faulkner. There is much about this book that borders on genius, but far more that obscures. Agee tries so hard to ge......more

Goodreads review by Molly on July 27, 2010

Let us now praise the fact that I have finished this book! It took me a month of pecking and absorbing and discarding and revisiting to get through it. A long, strange trip it was stylistically and unlike any journey I've taken before. Let me tell you about it. James Agee makes Faulkner look clear an......more

Goodreads review by Flora on April 13, 2008

Reading this book is like hanging on to the back of someone on roller skates racing top-speed down a steep hill, with no brakes. There are few books that explore with such rigor the impossibility -- and necessary ideal -- of perfect perspective, or have the audacity to admit melancholy as an action......more

Goodreads review by Clif on September 18, 2022

The Book's Origin: The writing of this book was the result of an assignment from Fortune magazine that sent Agee (writer) and Evans (photographer) into the American South during the summer of 1936 to collect material that could be used in a story about sharecroppers and tenant farmers. This book focu......more

Quotes

“Renowned for its fusion of social conscience and artistic radicality and for the way Evans’ spare, tautly composed images and Agee’s more extravagant prose complement and enhance each other.”

New York Times 

“A work of art.”

The Guardian (London)

“A unique and enduring mashup of reporting, confession, and oracular prose that sometimes takes your breath away…Profound, illuminating, and unforgettable.”

Daily Beast

“One of the most brutally revealing records of an America that was ignored by society—a class of people whose level of poverty left them as spiritually, mentally, and physically worn as the land on which they toiled. Time has done nothing to decrease this book’s power.”

Library Journal

“Agee’s text is a deeply felt examination of what it means to suffer, to struggle to live in spite of suffering…a book unlike any other, simmering with anger and beauty and mystery.”

Amazon.com

“[The] most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.”

Lionel Trilling, American literary critic, author, and teacher

Awards

  • New York Public Library 150 Most Important Books of the 20th Century
Add to Cart
Add to Wish List