actual persons behind them.) Agee's method might be compared to that of anthropology; but whereas the anthropologist (at least in his or her report) places distance between the reader and the individual subject, inviting the reader to watch general cultural patterns at work, Agee wants us to focus on his subjects' individuality.
As a piece of prose, the best way to characterize Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is to quote briefly from it:
There were three on the porch, watching me, and
they must not have spoken twice in an hour while they watched beyond the rarely traveled road ... a young man,
a young woman, and an older man; and the two younger,
their chins drawn inward and their heads tall against
the grained wall of the house, watched me steadily and sternly as if from beneath the br
...