Dale Maharidge, Michael Williamson (contributor) · 1989 (30th-anniversary ed. 2019) · EPUB · Calibre ID 10207
Resurfaced in Wish Books (2026-10-06).
Role in the triad
The return: the subjects read their own picture
Why this book
Revisits Agee’s three families in the mid-1980s under his pseudonyms and records the book coming home: Junior’s fury, Fred Ricketts’s pleasure, Maggie Louise (Agee’s Lucile) reading her mother’s copy, Emma’s retort. Opens a section on a 1941 USDA schoolbook, ‘Round the World with Cotton, dug out of an abandoned school, matching Agee’s opening. Answers Crews from the other side.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “He was holding a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the first he had ever seen, it is said. He fumed that it made them look like slaves.” (Part III, ‘Gudger’, 1960–1986)
- “Everyone gits rich offn us. I ain’t talking.” (Part III, ‘Gudger’)
- “He was nearly blind, but kept looking at Evans’s pictures. He was so happy that he was a famous man, Margaret recalls.” (Part III, ‘Ricketts’)
- “Before her death, say her relatives, Maggie Louise saw the Agee and Evans book, the copy owned by her mother.” (Part III, ‘Gudger’)
- “My goodness, I could turn around and write a book on him.” (Part III, ‘Gudger’)
- “And now we were returning to the scene of the crime, so to speak, coconspirators in the eyes of some, not just to inquire of the deed but to repeat it.” (Preface)
- “Word slowly drifted back to Alabama that some of their own had made up the cast of characters in a famous book.” (Part III, ‘Gudger’)
Themes
Famous Men’s reception · journalism ethics · King Cotton · mechanization · photographs · pseudonyms · Pulitzer · revisit · subjects reading their portrayal