Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Agee wrote and Evans photographed three Alabama sharecropper families during the Depression for Fortune magazine. Then the assignment mushroomed into this strange, beautiful, guilt-ridden meditation on poverty, observation, and the ethics of journalism. It failed commercially and became a masterpiece.
The circulating example is exact: “beginning on page 123, there's a forty-seven-page description of a wooden shack.” The sentences are colon-heavy and self-interrupting to the point that passages do not parse on a first read. Readers object that Agee's own guilt takes over, “frequent self-serving rants” and “maudlin prose, reams of lists” producing an “avalanche of dross”; one gives up outright: “I give up. I can't finish this nor ever will,” another that “the whole thing just annoyed the hell out of me.” His attention to the women is called lingering and charged. A critic's diagnosis is structural: Agee “took the structure of a journalistic piece, kick away the slats,” leaving “unedited footage, in other words.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
