Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, by James Agee.

It's an exhaustive autopsy of three Great Depression sharecropper families of Alabama. I reckon Agee examined every pebble and weed and fly in the county, to bring the story alive. And he does it well.

Agee died young, with a Pulitzer to his credit, and an American Classic thats as well-written and American as Huck Finn. I suspect John Steinbeck stole Agee's idea, to create THE GRAPES OF WRATH but Agee's book is better and sadder.

The sharecropper women are young and long to be beautiful and desired, Agee say they look for signs of their beauty without finding any, or without ever hearing it from others. Theyre like the animals there, overworked, ignored, and abused.

Agee speaks at length of the animals, how the cow who loses its calf goes crazy, how the mules exist in torment with diseases and parasites and beatings.

I recommend it if you wanna see how to write description.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...=nf4Jf9chlgN6qayxngMEiA&bvm=bv.43828540,d.dmg

Here is the book for those who are interested.

 

[carlieplum]

Thanks for the recommendation.

 

[SamScribble]

Many many years ago, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was one of the songs we sang at my slightly upmarket school. The second line of the song was 'and our fathers that begat us'. Two things worried me about this: First, why not 'our fathers who'? And second, were our fathers specifically excluded from being famous? I never reached a satisfactory conclusion.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Thanks for the recommendation.

I wanna say Agee wrote 2 books, total. LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN is a classic, and the other, I think its title is DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON, won a Pulitzer. I read Agee for the anal, OCD description.