Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

I will praise the great men is a book with text by American writer James Agee and photographs by American photographer Walker Evans, which was first published in 1941 in the United States. The German edition was published in 1989. The title is the beginning of a passage in the Book of Sirach 44.1 Let us now praise the great men, and our fathers, who witnessed us.

Background

The book prices I want the big men was due to a contract that the two men joined in 1936 to under a Farm Security Administration project to create an article about the living conditions of white sharecroppers in the American South. It was the time of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs of which have been introduced to support the poorest sections of the population. Agee and Evans spent eight weeks this summer, mainly under three, living in abject poverty, white farmer families to do research for her article. They returned with Evans collection haunting images - families with sunken faces, adults and children huddled together in austere huts, before dusty yards somewhere in the deep south at the time of the Depression - and Agee's detailed notes.

As he notes in the preface of the book, saw before the original contract, " to create photographic and descriptive document of daily life and environment of an average white sharecropper family '. However, only was, as the Literary Encyclopedia is, contrary to Agee's planning as a multi-volume work - entitled Three farm families - only the first volume, namely prices I want the great men wrote. Agee was convinced that a larger work, although originating from the journalism, would be " an independent introduction into the predicament of human divinity ."

Description

The book ultimately resulting is praised by the critics movement to the traditional forms and frontiers of the journalism behind. By combining factual report with passages of literary complexity and poetic beauty Agee provides a complete picture, an accurate, minutely detailed report of what he saw. He combines this with an insight into his feelings he had while he was trying to hold his experiences and difficulties for a wide readership. So he designed a sustainable Portrait of a nearly invisible group within the American population.

Although Agee and Evans work never appeared as the planned magazine article, their work lasted ultimately in its present form as highly in an original book. Agee's text is part ethnography, part anthropological study, and part novelistic, poetic, narrative text, set in the shacks and fields of Alabama. Evans black and white photographs, expressive, and the great poetry of the text support are included without comment as a portfolio in the book.

Basically the story of three families, namely the Gudgers, the Woods and the Ricketts - pseudonyms for Burroughs, Tengles and Fields - the book is also a meditation on the report penetrate, observe, influence, sufficient any student of anthropology, journalism to influence or even the Revolution.

James Agee

James Agee appears occasionally as a person in the story, when it is in the lives of these humble people break his head over his role as a "spy" and intruder. In other places, when he sets up a simple inventory lists the inventory of a Farmer cottage or shabby clothing that they wear on Sundays, he is completely oblivious. The strict division into books and chapters; the title, the bandwidth from the mundane ( "clothes" ) to the Art Customize (such as the " New York Times " they used ) is sufficient; humanity and size to see the direct calls Agee to the reader within this terrible life circumstances; to fulfill his despair at the thought of his self-imposed task or not, are part of the book.

Importance

Scientists have found that the challenging context of the book and the rejection of traditional writing parallel to preserve the creative, non-traditional programs of the U.S. government under Roosevelt, who aimed the dignity of poor families by helping them get out of their extreme poverty, but this paternalism and repression risked. Agee argues with literary, political, and moral traditions that might mean his people nothing, but for a wider readership, and in the larger context in the study of life on the other could be of importance.

There is little doubt that the length and the scenario, the unusual language and form that uses Agee I will make the great men at a outstanding book prices. The book has received high praise at all times and is regarded in the U.S. as a source of journalistic and literary innovation and inspiration.

Pseudonyms

Throughout the book Aggee and Evans use pseudonyms to conceal the identity of the three farm families. This agreement will be maintained in the following book And Their Children After Them. However, bear Evans photos, which are kept in the Library of Congress American Memory Project at the Department, the actual name of the people photographed.

* There is confusion as to whether the name Tengle or Tingle is written. Here the spelling of the Library of Congress will be used.