It's here, it's here! Cotton Tenants, the rediscovered typescript of what would eventually become James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was co-published by The Baffler and Melville House on Tuesday, June 4. First excerpted in Baffler #19, the completed work has already made the Amazon bestsellers list, and can be purchased through Melville House or any of your usual bookselling suspects. |
Praise for Cotton Tenants That's the first thing to be said about this essay: Fortune was crazy not to run it. . . . Magazines do like to have advertisers. Which only makes what The Baffler and Melville House have done more valuable.
The new book is a more accessible take on Agee's Alabama trip, offering a sublime showcase for his frequently masterful prose style.
The original magazine article was never published. . . What readers are about to discover now is what all the fighting was about.
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| Late in August the fields begin to whiten more rarely with late blooms and more frequently with cotton and then still thicker with cotton, like a sparkling ground starlight; and the wide tremendous light holds the earth beneath a glass vacuum and a burning glass. The bolls are rusty green, are bronze, are split and burst and splayed open in a loose vomit of cotton. . . . There is a great deal of beauty about a single burr and the cotton slobbering from it and about a whole field opening. The children and once in a while a very young or a very old man are excited and eager to start picking. It is a joy that scarcely touches most men and any women, though, and it wears off in half a morning and is gone for a year. James Agee, Cotton Tenants: Three Families |
