{"product_id":"9781621900306","title":"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: An Annotated Edition of the James Agee-Walker Evans Classic, with Supplementary Manuscripts","description":"\u003cbr\u003eIn the summer of 1936, writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans, on assignment\u003cbr\u003e for \u003ci\u003eFortune\u003c\/i\u003e magazine, went to central Alabama to document the lives of three white\u003cbr\u003e sharecropper families. Agee’s editors killed the article, and after a torturous five-year\u003cbr\u003e struggle to do artistic justice to the material, the author finally published it in book form\u003cbr\u003e as \u003ci\u003eLet Us Now Praise Famous Men\u003c\/i\u003e, only to see it sink with barely a ripple. The posthumous\u003cbr\u003e revival of Agee’s literary fortunes led to the work’s reissue in 1960, its adoption as an unofficial\u003cbr\u003e bible by civil rights workers, and its enshrinement as an American classic. It has\u003cbr\u003e remained in print ever since.\u003cp\u003eIn this, the third volume in The Works of James Agee series, editor Hugh Davis not\u003cbr\u003e only offers a thoroughly annotated edition of the Agee-Evans masterpiece, featuring invaluable\u003cbr\u003e explanatory notes as well as notes comparing the published work to extant copies of the\u003cbr\u003e original manuscript, but also supplements that text with a wealth of additional material: an\u003cbr\u003e insightful critical essay, variant versions of key sections, unused chapters, correspondence\u003cbr\u003e between Agee and others involved in the book’s publication (notably Houghton Mifflin editor\u003cbr\u003e Robert Linscott), generous selections from the author’s notebooks, and much more. This\u003cbr\u003e volume opens with the original gallery of Evans’s thirty-one photographs from the 1941\u003cbr\u003e edition and also includes, as part of the supplementary material, the expanded gallery of\u003cbr\u003e sixty-two photos that appeared in the 1960 edition. Here as well is the text of the rejected\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eFortune\u003c\/i\u003e article, “Cotton Tenants,” fully annotated for the first time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eInformed by Agee’s love of his subjects, his acute observational skills, and his poetic,\u003cbr\u003e passionate, raging voice—not to mention the stark artistry of Evan’s black and white photography\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eLet Us Now Praise Famous Men\u003c\/i\u003e is a book that to this day defies easy classification.\u003cbr\u003e This volume recaptures the aesthetic impact of the original, corrects errors from earlier\u003cbr\u003e editions, and, most important, illuminates the difficult process that spawned its creation.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Tennessee Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47053251018992,"sku":"9781621900306","price":103.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781621900306_p0.jpg?v=1769904928","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781621900306","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}