Hard Truths

Walker Evans's indelible 1936 images (left to right): the Crossroads general store, Alabama; sharecropper Floyd Burroughs; Allie Mae Burroughs

In June 1936 this magazine sent staff writer James Agee and his chosen photographer, Walker Evans, to Hale County, Ala., to report on the lives of cotton sharecroppers during the Depression. Agee and Evans were gone all summer, their progress and whereabouts a mystery for long stretches to their editors in New York, and when they finally returned, and Agee filed his piece, months late, Fortune rejected it.

Perhaps it was meant to be. For out of that failed assignment emerged five years later Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a nearly 500-page meditation on poverty, injustice, and the mysteries of the universe. The book sold only a handful of copies in Agee's lifetime, and was long out of print when its author -- a chain smoker, a hard drinker, and a suffering soul -- died in a New York City taxi in 1955 at the age of 45. Only after Agee's posthumously published novel, A Death in the Family, won the Pulitzer Prize did Famous Men find an audience, and ultimately its place in the American literary canon.