James Agee, Walker Evans (contributor) · 1936 (written); 2013 (first published) · EPUB · Calibre ID 889
Resurfaced in Wish Books (2026-10-06).
Role in the triad
Anchor: the visitor’s inventory of the wish-images on the tenant walls
Why this book
Gestext. The rejected Fortune report behind Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, under the families’ real names. Opens on Lucile Burroughs’s geography reader and records the Peters Shoes calendar girl ‘Cherie’ with ‘Lucile’ pencilled under it twice: the printed outside world inside the tenant house, seen by a visitor writing for a glossy magazine. Its chapters follow the reader’s ‘Food, Shelter, and Clothing’.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “a third grade geography textbook belonging to Lucile Burroughs, aged ten, daughter of a cotton tenant.” (Introduction)
- “Human life, we must assume in the first place, is somewhat more important than anything else in human life, except, possibly, what happens to it.” (Introduction)
- “a calendar advertising Peters Shoes, depicting a pretty girl in a red hat, cuddling red flowers. Title: Cherie. Subtitle (written twice, in pencil): Lucile.” (ch. 2, Shelter)
- “his features just a little exaggerated beyond that square-chiseled head which the commercial artist Leyendecker sets up as Goodlooking” (ch. 1, Business)
- “Real Life Readers—New Stories and Old. A Third Reader. (With color photographs about as real-life as color photographs get.)” (ch. 7, Education)
- “There are very, very few newspapers or magazines. What there are, are saved. The covers and pretty pictures are pasted on the walls; the children save and look at the comic sections over and over.” (ch. 8, Leisure)
- “The infiltration of all that has to do with the outside world is slow, verbal, and distorted in transit.” (ch. 8, Leisure)
Themes
documentary · Fortune · Hale County · Lucile Burroughs · real names vs pseudonyms · schoolbooks · tenant farming · Walker Evans · wall pictures