Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

1941. First Edition . AGEE, James and EVANS, Walker. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Three Tenant Families. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941. Octavo, original black cloth, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box. $5000.First edition of Agee and Evans' powerful and pioneering documentary photobook on the Great Depression—""the epitome of the genre""—with 31 full-page photogravures, in very elusive original dust jacket.""In 1936, on a journalistic assignment, James Agee and Walker Evans shared the lives of three sharecropper families in the Depression-gaunt South. Their report on the experience… became one of 1941s unforgettable books"" (New York Times). A groundbreaking collaboration between novelist and photographer, ""Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is regarded today as a classic of American literature… Evans' photographs—his only excursion into 'true' documentary—remain amongst the finest ever made"" (Parr & Badger I:144). At the time of publication, Lionel Trilling called this ""the most important moral effort of our American generation"" (Kenyon Review). Published in a small edition—the book was not to be reissued until 1960—copies of the first edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are extremely scarce and very desirable. Roth, 108-9. Book with mild tonight to top edge, dust jacket with a bit wear to extremities, including a faint crease to the spine, which has the usual toning. A near-fine copy.