James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men may be called the formative book of the 1960s--but not the 1960s as they eventually turned out, raucous with rock music and marijuana smoke, and reactionary with Nixon and the Silent Majority. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is instead formative of the 1960s as they began, formative of the New Frontier era, and of the era that embraced the War on Poverty in the belief that poverty was an ancient curse that could indeed be attacked and vanquished. Today we can scarcely speak of the War on Poverty with a straight face, but it arose a generation ago as a serious proposition on the part of young men who, if they had had little enough personal contact with the poor, had nevertheless grown up reading and thinking about them.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was central to their reading. It was and is, in effect, the nonfiction counterpart of The Grapes of Wrath; as Steinbeck devoted himself to telling the (fictional) tale of Southern sharecroppers who were forced onto the road during the Depression, so was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men the (nonfiction) account of the Southern sharecroppers who remained behind, and who fared no better than the ones who went west on Route 66. To Americans of the early 1960s, both books appeared as reminders of how close poverty had come to ordinary American lives in the recent p