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.
Tuesday, June 04, 2013
A piece of rejected journalism ...
Omnivoracious: Cotton Tenants: Introducing a Lost American Treasure, Recently Found. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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Bookforum, June/July/Aug 2013
ReplyDeleteSouthern 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