Cotton Tenants

Starred review from June 10, 2013
Seven decades have passed since Agee (A Death in the Family) and Evans were commissioned by Fortune magazine to "report on working conditions of poor white farmers in the deep south." The report itself was never published, and the manuscript stayed forgotten until as late as 2003, when it was exhumed from Agee's Greenwich Village home by one of his daughters. It is a time capsule: open it and you are transported to "a brief account of what happens to human life," specifically the lives of three impoverished tenant farmersâFloyd Burroughs, Bud Fields, and Frank Tingleâand their families, captured in Agee's honest, unflinching, and brilliant prose. Readers familiar with Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men will relish what is more than "source material", and recognize, for example, many of Agee's description of the diet, shelter, and labor of an Alabama tenant family. To readers unfamiliar, this will be an unexpected pleasure. It is the minute detail of the work that brings Depression-era Alabama to life, including the colloquialisms, (Miss Mary's calling the babies "coons"), medicinal remedies (swampwillow bark for chills, cottonseed poultices for head pains, rattlesnake grease for rheumatism), and the leisure time "of people who work." Photos.

Starred review from June 15, 2013

Before journalist Agee (1909-55) and photographer Evans (1903-75) published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a 400-page blend of prose and photography documenting the lives of three tenant farming families living in Hale County, AL, at the height of the Great Depression, they completed a heavily researched precursor titled Cotton Tenants. Commissioned in 1936 by Fortune magazine, the unpublished typescript was rediscovered in 2010. Beautifully written, the work is a stark, lucid, and organized indictment of the U.S. economic system, reporting its effects on the lives of three white sharecropping families. Arranged in chapters (e.g., business, food, shelter, clothing, picking season, etc.) and illustrated throughout with Evans's photographs, the work doesn't compare to the 1941 book, as author Adam Haslett (You Are Not a Stranger Here) in the book's introduction describes it as a "poet's brief," noting Agee's level of inquiry, that if applied to today's culture, would "help burn off some of that fog, waking us from the fantasy that we can all earn or win lottery sums." VERDICT Accessible, hard-hitting, moving, and still thematically relevant. Highly recommended for all collections.--Audrey Snowden, Orrington P.L., ME

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2013
This book is Agee's 1936 submission to Fortune magazine for an assignment on sharecroppers in the Deep South. Rejected and unpublished, the typescript was rediscovered in 2003 by Agee's daughter in her deceased father's Greenwich Village home. Cotton Tenants will enter the American literary canon for different reasons than Agee's far more developed classic on the same subject, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Here, Agee's discerning eye, crushing bluntness, and forward-falling prose poetry urge along before dunking readers' senses, again and again, into the families' way of life. Disdainful of sentiment and melodrama, Agee shows no bias, revealing his subjects and skewering both oppressors and supposed reformers. History, sociology, and economics instructors will like this compact book's quick, thorough engagement, and writing teachers can deservedly ask students, What is it? Journalism, sermon, inadvertent economy of language, manifesto? Yes, this nugget of . . . whateverwith an incisive preface by Adam Haslettis meant for use. Like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it contains photos by the prestigious Evans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)