COTTON TENANTS: THREE FAMILES
Book ID/图书代码： 08885013B62908
English Summary/英文概要： 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.”
Chinese Summary/中文概要： 1941年，記者James Agee與攝影師Walker Evans受Fortune雜誌的請求，到美國阿拉巴馬州記錄經濟大蕭條時期的面貌，在停留的兩個月裡，他們對當地貧窮的佃農日常生活進行貼身報導及調查，但當時Fortune雜誌的編輯因為考量其文體特殊而未採用該文章，之後James Agee和Walker Evans將兩本的成果合作出版成Let Us Now Praise Famous Men一書，該書出版後被當時著名的文學評論家Lionel Trilling讚譽此書是美國當代最重要及真實的報導文學作品。
而當時James Agee為Fortune雜誌撰寫的報導文章(取名為Cotton Tenants)一直被他保留著，直到他死後五十年才重新曝光。Let Us Now Praise Famous Men一書原文有400頁，而Cotton Tenants只有3萬字，同樣收錄Walker Evans的攝影作品。
Awards/获奖情况：More info here: http://www.mhpbooks.com/books/cotton-tenants/
The front page of the Arts Section in New York Times, and rave reviews in Bookforum and Fortune Magazine (links below) are just the beginning:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/business/media/james-agees-article-as-cotton-tenants-three-families.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/020_02/11650
http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/23/news/economy/agee-famous-men.pr.fortune/index.html
About the Author/作者介绍： James Agee (1909–1955) ，生於美國田納西州，1932年起成Fortune雜誌的撰稿人。1941年與攝影師Walker Evans共同出版經典報導文學之作Let Us Now Praise Famous Men。之後從事電影評論的工作，也寫劇本。另外著有普立茲得獎小說A Death in the Family。
JAMES AGEE (1909–1955) was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was hired as a staff writer at Fortune in 1932. Two years later, his collection of poetry, Permit Me Voyage, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. His book about Alabama tenant farmers during the Great Depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, appeared in 1941. Agee was later renowned for his film criticism, which appeared regularly in The Nation and Time, and for cowriting the screenplays for The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter. He died two years before his major work of fiction, A Death in the Family, was published and won the Pulitzer Prize.
WALKER EVANS (1903–75) was on loan from the Resettlement Administration when he began collaborating with James Agee. He joined the staff of Time in 1945 and shortly afterward became an editor at Fortune, where he stayed for the next two decades. In 1964, he became a professor at the Yale University School of Art, teaching until his death in 1975.
ADAM HASLETT (introduction) is the author of Union Atlantic and You Are Not a Stranger Here.
JOHN SUMMERS (editor) is the editor in chief of The Baffler.
Format:HARDCOVER
Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：AVAILABLE
Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE
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