Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75

Barely noticed upon publication in 1941, writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans’s unique chronicle of Alabama sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, would enjoy a remarkable revival during the 1960s. Remembering it as a “bible of sorts” for civil rights activists like himself, psychiatrist Robert Coles called it “an eloquent testimony that others had cared, had gone forth to look and hear, and had come back to stand up and address their friends and neighbors and those beyond ...