**entirely new reviewThe Tingles have in fact lost a certain grip on living … no longer thinking of what life they have in terms of something in the least controllable from season to season or even from day to day: they welter on their living as on water, from one hour to the next, flashing into brief impulse, disorganized and numbed; never quite clear, for instance, who will cook the next meal, or when. Poverty caused their carelessness; their carelessness brings them deeper poverty.from the fi...

Agee always fucks me up, and here I am again. I’m sitting here smoking, looking at the night sky, with only one thought: why’s it all have to be so fucking hard? Goodnight, James. ‘Night, friends. To a better world.

This short but haunting read was originally an article James Agee had written in 1936 as an assignment for Fortune Magazine.He spent an entire summer in Moundsville, Alabama (20 something miles south of Tuscaloosa) mostly visiting with three sharecropper families.Agee had a lot to crab about in his article -the living conditions of the sharecroppers -or, as they preferred to call themselves "tenant farmers". He raised holy hell with the editors of Fortune claiming that these families and others

Reflecting on the Great Depression Era: A sensitive homage to the SouthAt last we are privileged to see and read the initial brilliant journalistic evaluation of the effects of the great Depression on the `tenant farmers' (also known as sharecroppers) in the South as reported by the legendary James Agee (1905 - 1955) and photographed by Walker Evans (1903 - 1975). This `lost' manuscript was Agee's original contribution to Fortune Magazine who sent him on assignment to report on the conditions of...

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich states that since 2009, 95 percent of economic gains have gone to the top 1 percent net worth. In 2017, an Oxfam study found that eight rich people, six of them Americans, own as much combined wealth as half the human race.Cotton Tenants is a report on tenant farmers in the 1930s in Moundville, Alabama—with photos. I skimmed the detailed economic explanation of tenant farming, but picked up enough to realize that this is a look at wealth inequality in a mic...

an incredible forbes fortune magazine article, that never got printed. agee and photographer walker evans tour white 1936 cotton south to see how the economy was treating poor ass farmers. turns out they could have visited feudal ukraine or rural mexico and would have been the same picture. fdr finally got help to rural usa, via cooperative electricity, federal ag research and extension, water management, (lbj's 1965 voter rights act), built much needed FEDERAL sourced infrastructure. which we a...

"[Ida Ruth Tingle, age four] is possibly the last child they will bring into living, and she is extremely delicate. She dislikes what little food they have but loves chicken and coffee. So, steadily, they have bumped off a long string of chickens to feed her, and she drinks two or three cups of black and parboiled coffee at every meal. Her eyes shine like burning oil and almost continuously she dances with drunkenness."During the summer of 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, Fortune maga...

In the 1930's and 40's one did not have to go to another country to find people living in abject poverty, one only needed to visit the cotton belt of the good ol' USA. The plight of share croppers mostly white, but some black families, a generational poverty with no hope of ever rising above nor getting out of debt. Alabama, during the great depression, James Agee, a journalist, follows the work laden life of three families. Woman, who are worn out and look twenty years older than they should, m...

(nb: I received an advance review copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss) "Cotton Tenants: Three Families" takes us inside the backbreaking work and soul-breaking poverty of three tenant farmers in 1936 rural Alabama. It is hard to read without a sense of incredulity that people actually lived like this from generation to generation. This is the kind of book that indelibly impresses itself on your soul.In 1936, Fortune magazine sent staff writer James Agee and photographer Walker Eva...

Cotton Tenants is the story of three families struggling as tenant farmers in 1930's Alabama. It is a story of economic and social injustice but also of generational poverty. Originally the "report" was written for Fortune magazine but never published, the unconventional style of the article sited as the reason, the raw content must have been just as unconventional as the style and a factor as well. It is unconventional and it is uncomfortable to read at times.Agee's style of writing is eloquent...

Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee is a collection of essays on the life of tenant farmers in Hale County, Alabama. These are the leftovers, found in the author's estate, from his Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). http://pussreboots.com/blog/2017/comm...

Depressingly Poignant … This book was reviewed as part of Amazon's Vine program which included a free advance copy of the book.I’d seen the pictures of the somber-looking farming family assembled on a hastily-made porch throughout the years, but never gave them much thought other than assuming the pictures echoed the effects of the Great Depression in rural America. In other words, a snapshot of how bad life was during those years prior to America’s great economic salvation otherwise known as th...

Let Us Now Acknowledge that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is not James Agee’s most accessible book. If you’ve always felt like you should’ve plowed through it but inevitably lost steam somewhere inside the forest of his verbosity (and propensity for description) then by all means pick this one up now. A fascinating look at the lives of tenant farmers (and three families) in rural Alabama in the 1930s. The themes which Agee explores here—race relations, labor, poverty and health care—have never se...

Fascinating book of sharecroppers in 1936 Alabama. Agee’s prose and Evans photos bring the story to life. The poverty, ignorance, hopelessness of a time gone by will stay in your mind long after you finish the book.

The photos are phenomenal in this matter-of-fact book about the every day life of three poor southern families. Made me feel like a big, fat privileged Northern.

This sad little muckraking book gives an up-close-and-personal look at three families living as tenants on cotton farms in Alabama in the 1930s. All three families have substantial struggles; one family is still hoping to pull themselves or their children out of abject poverty but the other two families have given up.Agee describes their food (never enough), their clothes (mostly flour sacks), their working conditions (like all farmers, they work hard), their education, etc. Although the childre...

The closest comparative work I can think of is the one-act versus the full version of "View From the Bridge." Or, perhaps, to use a very Agee-esque analogy, this is to "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" when the "Eroica" piano variations are to the symphony. But still -- what was Luce, or, for that matter, any editor working for Luce, thinking? That Fortune might ever print this?

As a student of photography, essentially, this book is narrative put to the photography of Dorothea Lange, who with the onset of the Great Depression, used her camera lens to great and eminent effect to historically document the unemployed and homeless people of the Depression and the Dust Bowl, or Dirty Thirties, defining eras of early 20th Century America. Lange's skill in capturing this realism led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Secu...

The writing is beautiful, but the structure and the straight informative style are not my cup of tea. Thank god for the new journalism movement...