{"product_id":"9781612192123","title":"Cotton Tenants: Three Families","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographer\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published \u003ci\u003eLet Us Now Praise Famous Men\u003c\/i\u003e, a four-hundred-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama at the height of the Great Depression. The book shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Critic Lionel Trilling called it the “most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.” \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe origins of Agee and Evan's famous collaboration date back to an assignment for \u003ci\u003eFortune\u003c\/i\u003e magazine, which sent them to Alabama in the summer of 1936 to report a story that was never published. Some have assumed that \u003ci\u003eFortune\u003c\/i\u003e's editors shelved the story because of the unconventional style that marked \u003ci\u003eLet Us Now Praise Famous Men\u003c\/i\u003e, and for years the original report was lost.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut fifty years after Agee’s death, a trove of his manuscripts turned out to include a typescript labeled “Cotton Tenants.” Once examined, the pages made it clear that Agee had in fact written a masterly, 30,000-word report for \u003ci\u003eFortune\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublished here for the first time, and accompanied by thirty of Walker Evans’s historic photos, \u003ci\u003eCotton Tenants\u003c\/i\u003e is an eloquent report of three families struggling through desperate times. Indeed, Agee’s dispatch remains relevant as one of the most honest explorations of poverty in America ever attempted and as a foundational document of long-form reporting. As the novelist Adam Haslett writes in an introduction, it is “a poet’s brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCo-Published with \u003ci\u003eThe Baffler \u003c\/i\u003emagazine\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Melville House Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47037582672112,"sku":"9781612192123","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781612192123_p0.jpg?v=1763841166","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781612192123","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}