The Cruel Radiance of What Is: James Agee

Abstract

James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s combined narrative and photographic record of certain passages in the lives of three tenant families in rural Alabama was largely disregarded after its appearance in 1941, despite generally favorable reviews. The book’s initial critics were baffled as to its intended genre, and disapproved of Agee’s personal participation in the narrative. Having thus disapproved of the work’s raison d’être, however — its documentary value being utterly inseparable from its author’s self-investment in the subject — these critics praised the volume, in terms conditioned by their uncertainty as to how to classify it, for the ‘honesty’ and ‘originality’ of its prose.¹ Declining interest in the system of Southern sharecropping as an object of reformist activity, compounded by Agee’s assault within the text on reigning documentary expectations and reformist pieties, caused Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to go unread, by an American public increasingly preoccupied by the spread of world war.

the feeling increased itself upon me that at the end of a wandering and seeking, so long it had begun before I was born, I had apprehended and now sat at rest in my own home …

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men