Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75: Anniversary Essays ed. by Michael A. Lofaro (review)

Alongside celebrations and commemorations, anniversaries prompt reconsiderations of the past, surveys of the present, and anticipations of the future. Representing a wide range of historical, textual, and visual approaches, the nineteen essays collected in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75: Anniversary Essays respond to these impulses and offer an overview of and orientation to James Agee and Walker Evans's innovative and influential 1941 book. Alongside editor Michael A. Lofaro's excellent introductory materials, the essays provide a useful map of the field for specialists and a potential entry point for nonspecialist readers.

Noting Agee's layered, experimental prose and Evans's uncaptioned, stark portraits, Lofaro opens his introduction by acknowledging that, as reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men might induce "an altered state," it is useful to "[b]egin at the beginning" and consider the history of the book (p. 1). While many readers are familiar with this history, it is worth revisiting the conception, composition, and publication of the book as they can help us understand its strangeness and power. Accordingly, Lofaro describes the authors' 1936 sojourn in Alabama, their editorial disputes with two publishing houses, the failure of the original 1941 edition, and its 1960 reissue after Agee had posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel A Death in the Family (1957). It was only then, twenty-four years after they visited Alabama, that Agee and Evans found an audience who would embrace their work. This new audience, primarily young adults, especially those engaged in civil rights struggles in the South, looked to the book as a guide for understanding the South and rural poverty. This assessment held, and the book has since been seen as a significant, perhaps essential, work of literature, oral history, and documentary photography and a vital example of artistic and literary explorations of class and the South.

Lofaro's introduction is followed by a detailed timeline that tracks the development and publication of the book and situates it in the arc of Agee's and Evans's lives. These two chapters ably summarize the book's history, and, through readings of a few distinctive passages from the book and from Agee's archive, the introduction helpfully illustrates Agee's literary ambitions and documentary concepts. In addition to orienting readers to the idiosyncrasies of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, these introductory materials help frame the ideas explored in many of the essays.

Many of the essays in this volume situate Agee and Evans within literary and photographic history, including essays comparing their work with that of Herman Melville, Federico Garcia Lorca, William Wordsworth, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The most engaging and useful essays explore the connections between literary and visual arts or focus on Agee's and Evans's contributions to documentary and journalistic practice. Anne Bertrand and Jeffrey Couchman ably explore the intersections of the visual and textual, reminding us that photography is central to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and that throughout his life Agee paid attention to and was engaged with the visual arts. Agee, who later became a successful and influential screenwriter and film critic, conceived of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as a visual text that was best "read continuously," as one might watch a film or listen to music (p. 4).

In addition to being an essential component of the book, these visual and textual linkages and new modes of reading are essential aspects of the reimagination and expansion of journalism and documentary storytelling. David Moltke-Hansen's "'Consider the Ancient Generation': Sharecropping's Strange Compulsion" considers the curious fact that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men broke from standard journalistic practice and did not explicitly consider social, political, and historical contexts. Moltke-Hansen convincingly demonstrates that rather than being insensitive to or unaware of the pervasiveness and entrenchment of racism, poverty, and ignorance, Agee and...