Friday Reads: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Happy Friday!  Adam Pellman shares the nonfiction book he's reading: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, written by James Agee, with photographs by Walker Evans.

Adam Pellman is reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
by James Agee and Walker Evans

I first discovered the American writer James Agee when I was in film school as an undergraduate.  Agee wrote the screenplay for one of my favorite films, The Night of the Hunter (which you should absolutely watch if you've never seen it), and he was also a noted film critic.  I have yet to read his celebrated novel A Death in the Family, but I'm currently reading this nonfiction book, in which he chronicles the lives of poor tenant farm families in rural Alabama during the Great Depression (fun!).  The families live in utter destitution, but Agee describes their existence in some of the most elegant prose I've ever read.

In fact, at times Agee's writing is almost too poetic, so much so that I sometimes lose focus a bit as, for example, he spends several pages describing the furniture and personal belongings in a farmhouse bedroom.  Still, I find myself feeling a great appreciation for his mastery of language, and for the ways he reflects upon his own role as an outsider who has come to "spy" on these poor families.  Agee includes little bits of self-reflexive humor (e.g., including a brief quotation before the start of the main text, with a footnote that reads, "These words are quoted here to mislead those who will be misled by them"), and he is such a talented writer that his descriptions sometimes make me go back and re-read them.  One of my favorite passages reveals the backbreaking hardship of these families' daily lives, describing how one of the wives awakens in exhaustion each morning:

"She has not lacked in utter tiredness, like a load in her whole body, a day since she was a young girl, nor will she ever lack it again; and is of that tribe who by glandular arrangement seem to exhaust rather than renew themselves with sleep, and to whom the act of getting up is almost unendurably painful."

I've been pretty blown away by the writing in this book, so I'm looking forward to reading Agee's fiction in the near future.