James Agee/Walker Evans. Cotton Tenants. First Edition HC/DJ. 2013. Near fine!

James Agee and Walker Evans, Cotton Tenants: Three Families. Melville House Publishing, 2013. ISBN 978-1-61219-212-3. First edition with full number line on copyright page. Book is in near fine condition. Everything awesome on it--book boards, corners, spine, pages, dust jacket not clipped. The only flaw anywhere is a few spots on bottom of the text block as indicated in my pictures, which are of the actual book being offered for sale. 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 four-hundred-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 Evan'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 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and for years the original report was lost. But fifty years after Agee’s death, a trove of his manuscripts turned out to include a typescript labeled “Cotton Tenants.” Once examined, the pages made it clear that Agee had in fact written a masterly, 30,000-word report for Fortune. Published and accompanied by thirty of Walker Evans’s historic photos, Cotton Tenants: Three Families is an eloquent report of three families struggling through desperate times in America. Indeed, Agee’s dispatch remains relevant as one of the most honest explorations of poverty in America ever attempted and as a foundational document of long-form reporting. As the novelist Adam Haslett writes in an introduction, it is “a poet’s brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice.” Evans' images of heartbreaking poverty visually illustrate the dismaying conditions thousands of families suffered during the Depression. Agee writes that the three families he chose to study were representative of the whole.