Cotton Tenants ─ Three Families

A rediscovered master collaboration by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Death in the Family and the celebrated Great Depression photographer, originally created for a Fortune magazine article in 1936, provides an unsparing record of three families surviving under the harsh conditions of Depression-era poverty.

JAMES AGEE (1909–55) 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 co-writing 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.


Photographer 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.