ePub Cotton Tenants: Three Families download

by John Summers,Walker Evans,Adam Haslett,James Agee

Author:

John Summers,Walker Evans,Adam Haslett,James Agee

ISBN13:

978-1612192123

ISBN:

1612192122

Language:

English

Publisher:

Melville House; 1st edition (May 29, 2013)

Category:

Arts

Subcategory:

Photography & Video

ePub file:

1399 kb

Fb2 file:

1338 kb

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Rating:

4.2

Votes:

339

John Summers Walker Evans Adam Haslett James Agee Photography and Video English

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James Agee, in 'Cotton Tenants: Three Families'. The photographs by Walker Evans show people who could have been anyone's middle class neighbours, but instead were tied to poverty and de facto slavery by the limited expectations of themselves and their landowners

Cotton tenants: three families. Cotton Tenants marked Agee’s first attempt to tell the story of that momentous trip.

Cotton tenants: three families. Cover photograph: Walker Evans, Floyd Burroughs and Tingle Children, Hale County, Alabama, 1936. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Walker Evans: 9781612193984: Photography: Canada, John Summers, Adam Haslett, Cotton Tenants: Three Families: James Agee, Up to 90% off Textbooks at Canada, free two-day shipping for six months when you sign.

Three Families Cotton Tenants ( D-F ) Books Three Families ( D-F ) Cotton Tenants Books Three Families Books Cotton Tenants ( D-F ) Three Families Cotton Tenants ( D-F ) Books.

A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographer. In James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a prose symphony about.

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In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a. .The book shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Cotton tenants: three families.

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. Critic Lionel Trilling called it the most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.

In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise . Agee returned to New York, wrote an article that he titled Cotton Tenants: Three Families. Adam Haslet writes in the introduction to Cotton Tenants: "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a 400 page sui generis prose symphony on the themes of poverty, rural life, and human existence.

by John Summers, Adam Haslett, James Agee and Walker Evans. John Summers, Adam Haslett, et al. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Provides an unsparing record of three families surviving under the harsh conditions of Depression-era poverty in 1936 rural Alabama.

In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a 400-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama, at the height of the Great Depression. The origins of Agee and Evans’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. The origins of Agee and Evans 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.

A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographerIn 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 here for the first time, and accompanied by thirty of Walker Evans’s historic photos, Cotton Tenants is an eloquent report of three families struggling through desperate times. 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.”Co-Published with The Baffler magazine

Gaeuney

I have often heard the stories from my father, now 80, of growing up in a share cropping family in Texas. While I always found the stories interesting, they never portrayed the real full story. So when I read about this book in Fortune magazine, I knew I had to read it.

The hard scrabble life these people had is extraordinary. They are completely trapped in a system that never rewards them enough to escape, but provides just almost enough to live on - with always the promise of a better next year. Mr Agee gives such a strong visual sense in his writing and the photographs leave you wanting to help these folks. It makes me mad, nearly 100 years later to see how we treated each other back then.

The families have their happy moments. However, the complete lack of health care and the hardships involved make them fleeting. While a very short book, it is powerful and takes you back to the time of the great depression with all the unflattering truths exposed.

This book is a must for those who really want to understand living in the south during the depression. I am so glad my Grandparents were able to pull away and start a new life for my Dad. I wonder how the descendants of those in the book made out...

Llathidan

"A civilisation which for any reason put a human life at a disadvantage; or a civilization which can exist only by putting human life at a disadvantage; is worthy neither of the name nor of continuance. And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefer that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea."
- - James Agee, in 'Cotton Tenants: Three Families'

Faced with this assesment in his story about three Anglo sharecrop families, Fortune magazine in 1936 refused to run the story by James Agee that is now the book 'Cotton Tenants: Three Families'.

It was Fortune's loss; on a business sense, it is almost unbelievable stupidity that Southern aristocrats leased 20-acre plots of land to families such as Agee described. Common sense dictated "rural clearances" to evict families from such marginal operations, then select the best of those farmers to tend 160-acre or 320-acre parcels of cotton. Cotton farming, as Agee experienced it, was the equivalent of Henry Ford hiring workers with a hacksaw, metal shears and a ball-peen hammer to build his Model T's.

Unfortunately, Agee was an American communist - - it means he could see only the idealism of communism, not the human lives it put at a disadvantage. The 1930's was the era of great Soviet collectivisation; perhaps in knee-jerk reaction Fortune's editors decided 20-acre sharecrop farms were the last best refuge of American independence and freedom.

By itself, the book stands as a grim account of what Southern poverty meant for Anglo and African-American alike. The photographs by Walker Evans show people who could have been anyone's middle class neighbours, but instead were tied to poverty and de facto slavery by the limited expectations of themselves and their landowners.

And who are today's tenant farmers? Has anyone looked at the profusion of "entry level" and minimum wage jobs? How many people now live on $15,080-a-year jobs in much the same conditions as these tenant farmers? Agee's observations were a searing comment on how American existed in the 1930's - - the question he leaves, almost 80 years later and many basic conditions having changed - - is how much has changed?

His reporting is as relevant today as in 1936. It's a pity 'Fortune' magazine - - a superb journal today as presumably in those years (I didn't start reading it until the 1950's) - - is missing the true story of American business.

All in all, a superb book; as relevant today as Agee's story in 1936. What changes? Will the status quo ever change? How much of societies is permanently 'minimum wage'? How much of society is permanently 'minimum I.Q.'?

Blackredeemer

Agee and Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was and is a classic work of American literature, the 20th century equivalent of Melville's Moby Dick-- in its sprawling reach, and overreach, in its readiness to shock by moving far outside the bounds of literary, social and political propriety, and in its fundamental obsession with the humanist's struggle to find order, meaning and value in the face of cruelty and chaos. This book, Cotton Tenants, is the authors' earlier attempt to produce a more understated and condensed-- and necessarily more accessible-- report on their assignment for Fortune magazine to explore rural poverty in the Great Depression sharecropping South. It's an illuminating read for anyone who has struggled through the larger work-- it's like listening to Dylan's outtakes or Hendrix live-concert reissues: the final version is manifestly more ambitious in scope and polished in execution, but the original crackles with outrage and insight. Evans's pictures haven't changed a bit-- they're still as perfect a body of modernist documentary photography as anyone has done since the birth of the medium. And don't let the listing of Agee as author by various misguided publishers and their publicists fool you: Agee was adamant that Evans's photographs were coequal if not superior witnesses and testimonies.

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