June Not Fiction Book Discussions

Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee and Walker Evans is an interesting historical document for many reasons. Not only is an early example of experimental long-form reporting that was "new" well before New Journalism became a popular style in the 1960s; it also offers a contemporary portrait of the effects of the bust cycle that followed the boom of the 1920s we read about in last month's book, One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson.

Agee and Walker were sent by Fortune to Alabama in 1936 to write an article about tenant farmers for the magazine. Evans was at the time employed by the Farm Security Administration and took special leave to work with Agee. They spent a month in Hale County, living and working closely with the families whose lives they document. The article was never published, possibly because the section for which it was written, Life and Circumstance, was discontinued, or because the article would be financially and politically challenging for Fortune and its readers, although a definite reason has never been determined. The article was found in 2010 among his personal papers from his home in New York, which were donated by the James Agee Trust to the University of Tennessee Special Collections Library. Baffler Magazine, edited by John Summers, published a portion of the article in 2012, and Melville House published it in its entirety in 2013.

In his preface, Adam Haslett describes Cotton Tenants as " . . . a kind of morally indignant anthropology. An ethnography delivered from the pulpit." How would you describe the book? What is its genre? What role do Evans' photographs serve in Cotton Tenants? Is their message and purpose the same as Agee's text--in other words, do they merely illustrate his text? Or do they make an argument in and of themselves? Do you feel that Cotton Tenants is a good document of the tenant farming system? Although Agee and Evans' purpose was to call attention to their readers' blind spots and prejudices about the socioeconomic and cultural reality of the extreme poverty inherent in the tenant farming system, are they guilty of their own blind spots and prejudices, especially by today's standards? What connections, both in subject and in form, do you see between other books we have read in our discussions, such as The Unwinding by George Packer, Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, and Boomerrang by Michael Lewis? We will consider these questions and more . . .

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, June 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, June 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.