What readers have known for decades is that Agee used his reporting material to create his 1941 book, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” a literary description of abject poverty in the South, accompanied by starkly haunting Walker Evans photographs. The original magazine article was never published, as Agee squabbled with his editors over what he felt was the exploitation and trivialization of destitute American families. In the early pages of “Famous Men,” he wrote that it was obscene for a commercial enterprise to “pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings.” What readers are about to discover now is what all the fighting was about.
On Tuesday Melville House will publish Agee’s original, unprinted 30,000-word article in book form, under the title “Cotton Tenants: Three Families.” The publication gives Agee fans a glimpse of an early draft of what became a seminal work of American literature.
“With the book, we have a much better map of him writing ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,’ “ said John Summers, who edited “Cotton Tenants” and printed an excerpt from the article in a literary journal he edits, The Baffler.
The release of the book, which includes the real names of Agee’s subjects, also reignites a decades-long debate over Agee’s decision to protect the identities of his subjects when he wrote “Famous Men.” In the ensuing years some journalists avoided publishing the real names, because descendants of the original families were ambivalent about how Agee had portrayed their lives. Others used the names, including David Whitford in his 2005 article for Fortune titled “The Most Famous Story We Never Told.”
Mort Jordan, a former journalist and filmmaker, who produced a documentary about the families in the early 1980s and used their names sparingly, drove to Moundville, Ala., last week to alert some of the descendants to the publication of “Cotton Tenants.” He said there was not much protest because “everybody knows who they are anyway.” He noted that their feelings about having their names used has changed.
The original subjects of “Famous Men,” Mr. Jordan said, “were embarrassed because it showed them living in squalor.” With time, he added, “what may have been embarrassment or a quandary had turned into a source of pride with some of them.”
Irvin Fields, whose grandfather Bud Fields was featured in the book, said he didn’t mind that the names were now being published.
“It makes me appreciate my relatives for bearing up under those circumstances and making me appreciate what I’ve got today,” Mr. Fields said in a telephone interview.
The tale of the unpublished article began in 1936 when Fortune editors grew interested in tenant farmers and assigned the task to Agee, then a staff writer in his late 20s. At the time Agee was on leave from the magazine, living in Florida and trying to repair his marriage, according to Dale Maharidge’s book “And Their Children After Them.”
Agee insisted that the magazine hire Evans, who at the time was working for a New Deal agency, according to Reeva Hunter Mandelbaum, a producer who is developing a film about Agee.
When Agee returned to New York with his reporting, he discovered that Fortune had changed its editorial approach, Ms. Mandelbaum said. Its publisher, Henry R. Luce, was under pressure to cater to investors, who might help finance his newest venture, Life magazine, she said. It is unclear exactly what Agee submitted to Fortune, but Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University professor who wrote “The Publisher,” a Luce biography, said in an e-mail: “It wasn’t Luce who didn’t publish the article. It was Agee who never produced an article that could be published in Fortune.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/business/media/james-agees-article-as-cotton-tenants-three-families.html?partner=rss&emc=rss