by James Agee
First published 2014
In 1936, Fortune magazine dispatched writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans to Alabama's Hale County to document tenant farming during the Great Depression. Their assignment never ran in the magazine, but Agee produced a complete 30,000-word report that disappeared for decades. This lost manuscript, discovered fifty years after Agee's death, captures three families struggling through economic desperation. Agee examines their daily lives, living conditions, and the social systems that trapped them in poverty. The report combines detailed observation with moral urgency, creating what novelist Adam Haslett calls "a poet's brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice." Walker Evans's thirty accompanying photographs document the same harsh realities. This material later evolved into the famous book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," but "Cotton Tenants" presents Agee's original, more conventional journalistic approach to the subject.
Genres: 20th-century, non-fiction, biography-memoir, american-history
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: investigative-journalism, social-commentary
Setting: Alabama, Hale County
Period: 1936
224 pages · Paperback · Melville House