Cotton Tenants: Three Families Paperback - 2014

Media reviews

"A masterpiece of the magazine reporter’s art. It is lucid, evocative, empathetic, deeply reported, consistently surprising, plainly argued, and illuminated, page after page, with poetic leaps of transcendent clarity.”—Fortune

"Agee squabbled with his editors over what he felt was the exploitation and trivialization of destitute American families…. What readers are about to discover now is what all the fighting was about.” —The New York Times

”Cotton Tenants reads with the spare and measured beauty of a writer who knows that under the social circumstances he can only allow himself so much. It is a deeply moving work…Cotton Tenants is fresh and painful reading.” —The Awl 

"That’s the first thing to be said about this essay: Fortune was crazy not to run it. It was a failure of nerve, and a lost chance at running one of the great magazine pieces from that era.”—John Jeremiah Sullivan, Bookforum

"An all-in, embracive rendering, panoramic as Brueghel while typecasting like Ben Shahn . . . Agee may be our foundational maximalist, the progenitor of Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace.”—The Los Angeles Review of Books

"A paragon of lyrical realism, the book is a legend. . .Agee writes with clinical, angry precision.” —The Boston Globe 

"Agee’s discerning eye, crushing bluntness, and forward-falling prose poetry urge along before dunking readers’ senses, again and again, into the families’ way of life. Disdainful of sentiment and melodrama, Agee shows no bias, revealing his subjects and skewering both oppressors and supposed reformers.” —Booklist


Praise for James Agee and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

“A book of wonders—an untamable American classic in the same line as Leaves of Grass and Moby-Dick.” —David Denby, The New Yorker

“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is . . . a classic work, an exercise in pure, declarative humanism. It will read true forever.” —David Simon, creator of The Wire

“The most copiously talented writer of my generation.” —Dwight Macdonald

“The most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.” —Lionel Trilling

“The most remarkable regular event in American journalism today.” —W. H. Auden



From the Hardcover edition.