Cotton Tenants · Three Families

**A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated

photographer**

In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_

, a 400-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale

County, Alabama, at the height of the Great Depression. The book shattered

journalistic and literary conventions. Critic Lionel Trilling called it the

“most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.”

The origins of Agee and Evans’s famous collaboration date back to an

assignment for _Fortune_ magazine, which sent them to Alabama in the summer of

1936 to report a story that was never published. Some have assumed that

_Fortune_ ’s editors shelved the story because of the unconventional style

that marked _Famous Men_ , and for years the original report was presumed

lost.

But fifty years after Agee’s death, a trove of his manuscripts turned out to

include a typescript labeled “Cotton Tenants.” Once examined, the pages made

it clear that Agee had in fact written a masterly, 30,000-word report for

_Fortune_.

Published here for the first time, and accompanied by thirty of Walker Evans’s

historic photos, _Cotton Tenants_ is an eloquent report of three families

struggling through desperate times. Indeed, Agee’s dispatch remains relevant

as one of the most honest explorations of poverty in America ever attempted

and as a foundational document of long-form reporting. As the novelist Adam

Haslett writes in an introduction, it is “a poet’s brief for the prosecution

of economic and social injustice.”