Cotton Tenants: Three Families

In the summer of 1936, James Agee set out with photographer Walker Evans on an assignment for Fortune magazine.

Their mission was to explore the plight of sharecroppers during the Great Depression.

The journey fostered an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when the resulting report was turned into a book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published in 1941.

Agee's original dispatch, accompanied by 25 of Walker Evans' historic photos, is an unsparing record of place and of three families who worked the land at a desperate time.