Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: An Annotated Edition of the James Agee-Walker Evans Classic, with Supplementary Manuscripts: Three Tenant Families (Collected Works of James Agee, 3, Band 3) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1621900304 ISBN 13: 9781621900306

Verlag: UNIV OF TENNESSEE PR, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

In the summer of 1936, writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans, on assignment
for Fortune magazine, went to central Alabama to document the lives of three white
sharecropper families. Agee’s editors killed the article, and after a torturous five-year
struggle to do artistic justice to the material, the author finally published it in book form
as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, only to see it sink with barely a ripple. The posthumous
revival of Agee’s literary fortunes led to the work’s reissue in 1960, its adoption as an unofficial
bible by civil rights workers, and its enshrinement as an American classic. It has
remained in print ever since.

In this, the third volume in The Works of James Agee series, editor Hugh Davis not
only offers a thoroughly annotated edition of the Agee-Evans masterpiece, featuring invaluable
explanatory notes as well as notes comparing the published work to extant copies of the
original manuscript, but also supplements that text with a wealth of additional material: an
insightful critical essay, variant versions of key sections, unused chapters, correspondence
between Agee and others involved in the book’s publication (notably Houghton Mifflin editor
Robert Linscott), generous selections from the author’s notebooks, and much more. This
volume opens with the original gallery of Evans’s thirty-one photographs from the 1941
edition and also includes, as part of the supplementary material, the expanded gallery of
sixty-two photos that appeared in the 1960 edition. Here as well is the text of the rejected
Fortune article, “Cotton Tenants,” fully annotated for the first time.

Informed by Agee’s love of his subjects, his acute observational skills, and his poetic,
passionate, raging voice—not to mention the stark artistry of Evan’s black and white photography
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book that to this day defies easy classification.
This volume recaptures the aesthetic impact of the original, corrects errors from earlier
editions, and, most important, illuminates the difficult process that spawned its creation.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hugh Davis is an associate professor of English at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia. He is the author of The Making of James Agee and coeditor, with Michael A. Lofaro, of James Agee Rediscovered: The Journals of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Other New Manuscripts, both published by the University of Tennessee Press.
James Agee (1909–1955) was an American writer in mutliple genres. As a journalist, he pioneered serious film criticism. As a novelist, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his posthumously published A Death in the Family. As a screenwriter, he worked on revered films The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter. 
Walker Evans (1903–1975) was a photographer, most famously for the Farm Security Administration, for whom he worked from 1935 until 1938. His works include American Photographs, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Many Are Called.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

(On the Porch: 1
The house and all that was in it had now descended deep beneath the gradual spiral it had sunk through; it lay formal under the order of entire silence. In the square pine room at the back the bodies of the man of thirty and of his wife and of their children lay on shallow mattresses on their iron beds and on the rigid floor, and they were sleeping, and the dog lay asleep in the hallway. Most human beings, most animals and birds who live in the sheltering ring of human influence, and a great portion of all the branched tribes of living in earth and air and water upon a half of the world, were stunned with sleep. That region of the earth on which we were at this time transient was some hours fallen beneath the fascination of the stone, steady shadow of the planet, and lay now listing toward the last depth; and now by a blockade of the sun were clearly disclosed those discharges of light which teach us what little we can learn of the stars and of the true nature of our surroundings. There was no longer any sound of the settling or ticking of any part of the structure of the house; the bone pine hung on its nails like an abandoned Christ. There was no longer any sound of the sinking and settling, like gently foundering, fatal boats, of the bodies and brains of this human family through the late stages of fatigue unharnessed or the early phases of sleep; nor was there any longer the sense of any of these sounds, nor was there, even, the sound or the sense of breathing. Bone and bone, blood and blood, life and life disjointed and abandoned they lay graven in so final depth, that dreams attend them seemed not plausible. Fish halted on the middle and serene of blind sea water sleeping lidless lensed; their breathing, their sleeping subsistence, the effortless nursing of ignorant plants; entirely silenced, sleepers, delicate planets, insects, cherished in amber, mured in night, autumn of action, sorrow’s short winter, waterhole where gather the weak wild beasts; night; night: sleep; sleep.
In their prodigious realm, their field, bashfully at first, less timorous, later, rashly, all calmly boldly now, like the tingling and standing up of plants, leaves, planted crops out of the earth into the yearly approach of the sun, the noises and natures of the dark had with the ceremonial gestures of music and of erosion lifted forth the thousand several forms of their entrancement, and had so resonantly taken over the world that this domestic, this human silence obtained, prevailed, only locally, shallowly, and with the childlike and frugal dignity of a coal-oil lamp stood out on a wide night meadow and of a star sustained, unraveling in one rivery sigh its irremediable vitality, on the alien size of space.
Where beneath the ghosts of millennial rain the clay land lay down in creek and the trees ran thick there disposed upon the sky the cloud and black shadow of nature, hostile encampment whose fires were drenched, drawn close, held sleeping, near, helots; and it was feasible that within a few hours now, at the signaling of the primary changes of the air, the wave which summer and darkness had already so heavily overcrested that it leaned above us, snaring its snake-tongued branches, birnam wood, casually would lounge in and suddenly and forever subdue us: at most, some obscure act of guerrilla warfare, some prowler, detached from his regiment, picked off in a back country orchard, some straggling camp whore taken, had; for the sky:
The sky was withdrawn from us with all her strength. Against some scarcely conceivable imprisoning wall this woman held herself away from us and watched us: wide, high, light with her stars as milk above our heavy dark; and like the bristling and glass breakage on the mouth of stone spring water: broached on grand heaven their metal fires.
And now as by the slipping of a button, the snapping and failures on air of a spider’s cable, there broke loose from the room, shaken, a long sigh closed in silence. On some ledge overleaning that gulf which is more profound than the remembrance of imagination they had lain in sleep and at length the sand, that by degrees had crumpled and rifted, had broken from beneath them and they sank. There was now no further extreme, and they were sunken not singularly but companionate among the whole enchanted swarm of the living, into a region prior to the youngest quaverings of creation.
(We lay on the front porch:
 

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF TENNESSEE PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1621900304
• ISBN 13: 9781621900306
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 1084
• Herausgeber: Davis Hugh
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland