New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans

Coinciding with the increasing intersections between visual and literary studies, this timely reappraisal of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sheds light on the book's unclassifiable status as part imaginative fiction, documentary effort, ethnographic study, and modernist prose.

"One early reviewer of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men described it as 'a book that refuses to call itself a book,' while another in similar spirit compared it to the unclassifiable textual monster that is Melville's Moby-Dick. Blinder's collection of consistently lively and illuminating essays does full justice to the haunting complexity of Agee and Evans's classic volume, issuing an irresistible invitation to revisit this unique mix of hot prose and cool photography." - Peter Nicholls, Professor of English, New York University

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men may be understood as the most interstial of works: awkwardly poised, as it is, between photography and text; high art and journalism; lament and rebuke; religion and sociology; language and its failure; porch and cotton field . . . New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans gathers together the very considerable insights of cultural historians, literary and visual scholars, film experts, psychoanalytically persuaded critics and ethnographic readers. As such, read whole and with an eye to its own generative and apt interstices, the collection constitutes the best available guide to Evans and Agee's ongoing arguments." - Richard Godden, Professor of English, University of California-Irvine

CAROLINE BLINDER is Lecturer in English and American Literature at Goldsmiths College at the University of London, UK.