Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families

Octavo. xxii, 471 pp. plates. Second edition, first printing. As issued, in publisher's cloth with dust jacket. Foxing to the textblock edge and a previous owner name on the front pastedown else, clean; dust jacket is lightly edgeworn and a bit darkened at the spine; price intact on the front flap. Originally issued in 1941, this book did not get the recognition it deserved as the United States was near to enter the Second World War. This second edition was released nearly 20 years later with photographs not present in the first. This is a very nice copy of the first printing of the revised and expanded edition of Agee and Evans's landmark work on Alabama sharecroppers. Of this book William Reese writes: "The evocation of the hardscrabble lives of the sharecroppers, the eye for the smallest details of their material existence, and the empathy for their often grim lot, shines through on every pages. Anyone who wants to understand the American South, and indeed much about the United States, should read this book" (Reese, Narratives of Personal Experience, 4). A magnificent collaboration.…