Before he praised famous men

Years before the publication of his haunting landmark book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” writer James Agee traveled the dirt roads and cotton fields of Alabama to document the life of poor, white tenant farmers in the 1930s.

He was on an assignment for Fortune magazine, then run by Henry R. Luce, one of the most influential publishers of his day. Luce believed he could take lyrical young poets such as Agee and turn them into the kind of business writers who would produce stories that described the impact of business on people’s lives. The stories would be written in beautiful language, not business jargon, and with humanity.

Agee returned from his trip and wrote an article that described poverty, suffering, ignorance and pluck. The writing was not as lush as what was to come later in “Famous Men.” It was, by comparison, spare and for that reason the destitution Agee described was as piercing to a reader as a wasp sting.

Fortune never published the 30,000-word article, for reasons still under debate. Neither did anyone else. The piece languished, faded from many memories and eventually become part of the voluminous pile of work and notes that Agee’s family gave to the University of Tennessee decades after his death in 1955. (Agee was a Tennessee native). Researchers rediscovered it a couple of years ago when going through the papers.

Now the work has been given new life. After historian and literary magazine editor John Summers published a portion in his magazine “The Baffler” last year, he partnered with Melville Publishing House to release the full manuscript. “Cotton Tenants: Three Families” (Melville House) was released earlier this month. It includes black and white photographs from the late photographer Walker Evans, who was on the Alabama assignment with Agee.

Summers will speak about “Cotton Tenants” on Monday at the Jimmy Carter Library. Here, he talks about publishing the book and the work of a gifted, young writer.

Q: Why do you think Fortune declined to publish the article originally?

A: This was a transaction that was conducted orally in the Chrysler Building between his editors and Agee. So we don't have any smoking gun, but there were internal office politics going on. The editor that assigned Agee to the Alabama trip was moved. There was a new managing editor. There were lots of circumstantial things going on. And he couldn't have given it to a rival magazine because he was a staff writer at Fortune.

Q: There’s a school of thought that when a writer is forced to pull back a bit in the writing, it makes the work stronger. The writing in “Cotton Tenants” is economical. With that in mind, do you think “Cotton Tenants” might in some ways be a stronger book than “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men?”

A: The strength of the piece is precisely because it was a Fortune magazine article. And you have to ask, why was James Agee hired as a staff writer for Fortune right out of Harvard? The reason he was hired was because he was a poet. Henry Luce though he could teach poets how to write about business. So what you find is a kind of a "poet's brief," where as "Famous Men" is more of a "prose symphony." There's a level of precision in (Cotton Tenants) that poets know how to do.

Q: Were the descendants of the tenant farmers given an opportunity to read the manuscript before you published the book?

A: There has been a book called "And Their Children After Them" that talked to all of the descendants. It was published in the late 1980s and it traced the descendants and their trajectories from the point that "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" started. So it seemed as if that work had already been done. So I'm not sure what we would have been able to add.

Q: What are the implications of Agee’s work now and what parallels do you see today in the stories he told from Alabama in the 1930s?

A: We get to see James Agee in a way that nobody else has been able to see him before and have sort of changed his legacy as a writer. In addition we get a work that's grounded in an economic situation that seems, in a very unsettling way, all too familiar to us today. Much of the work is about what we think of now as the "debt trap." The hopelessness of these families' lives is that they are in debt and they are not likely to get out of debt. And the fact is there's a major social crisis going on in the country right now and much of that is directly related to personal debt. Whether it's consumer debt, mortgage debt or student loan debt, we seem to have been put in a trap and it looks eerily familiar.