Tuesday, June 04, 2013

A piece of rejected journalism ...

Omnivoracious: Cotton Tenants: Introducing a Lost American Treasure, Recently Found. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


Cotton Tenants, now published for the first time, is a good deal more than source material for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The latter is a four-hundred-page sui generis prose symphony on the themes of poverty, rural life, and human existence. Cotton Tenants is a poet’s brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice. The former, as Agee himself tells us, is meant to be sung; the latter, preached.
And the message is unsettling: “A civilization which for any reason puts 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.” Agee’s aim is to excite the reader’s outrage by describing the particular disadvantages of tenant farmers in meticulous detail.

1 comment:

  1. Bookforum, June/July/Aug 2013
    Southern Exposures
    A long-lost manuscript both complements and rivals a classic work of Depression-era documentary reportage
    John Jeremiah Sullivan

    http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/2002/11650

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