Content area
Full text
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75: Anniversary Essays
TIMEFULNESS AND NOW 75 Years of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75: Anniversary Essays. Ed. Michael A. Lofaro. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2017. 414 pp. $54.00 cloth.
Despite or maybe because of its near anonymity upon release in 1941, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee's and Walker Evans's photojournalistic exploration of three Alabama tenant families' lives, has become a securely canonical yet often inscrutable object of study. This chronological point in its existence offers a prodigious opportunity to consider its value in American and southern culture. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75: Anniversary Essays, edited by Michael A. Lofaro, uses the seventy-fifth anniversary of the work's publication to reassess and reconsider its place in literature, culture, and history. True to Famous Men's eclectic nature, the collection covers a wide array of topics, methodologies, and approaches. The contributors offer personal responses to the work while still maintaining productive analytical distance. In addition to the more organic nature of the collection's chapter order, Lofaro provides a table of contents that separates the essays into topical categories: general introduction to the work, its literary and historical antecedents, its cultural contemporaries and progeny, "more views and re-views," and a final coda in which Andrew Crooke travels to and reflects upon a modern sojourn to the real Hobe's Hill. Each of these divisions overlaps and exemplifies the confounding liminality of Agee's prose and Evan's photography even three-quarters of a century...