Cotton Tenants: Three Families by Agee, James - 2013

Booklyn & London: Melville House, 2013. First Edition, First Printing. Fine Hardcover in a Fine Dust Jacket. New/New. Photographs by Walker Evens.

No Flaws or Blemishes; Gift Quality. 7.5 inches tall; 222 pages; illustrated with b/w photography.

Edited by John Summers with a preface by Adam Haslett.. A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographer.

In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a 400-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."

The origins of Agee and Evans's famous collaboration date back to an assignment for Fortune magazine, which sent them to Alabama in the summer of 1936 to report a story that was never published. Some have assumed that Fortune's editors shelved the story because of the unconventional style that marked Famous Men, and for years the original report was presumed lost.