signs, space, forms. These were his world and were his words. he found the special language with signs. and his language was the expression of his own world which would be woldwide. his hungry eyes saw the world through his angry intelligence with the pronteer.

I don't agree that the writing is fantastic. I think that at times it bogs down and can be very boring. But the images Agee leaves with you are matched by the photographs of Evans. They are unforgettable. Read the chapter where Agee takes an entire household inventory. Amazing! I've always wanted to know--what happened to these people? These specific families...where are the children now? Did that one little girl live to adulthood? Did any of them "make something" of themselves? Fascinating questions...possibly disturbing answers.

What is this thing?!?!? - As John Hersey says in the introduction (page xxviii), "There had never been, and there will never be, anything quite like this book."-On the back cover, a dashing Agee is pictured with a glass of what one presumes to be a shot of the strong stuff in his hand. Appropriately, because the writing resembles nothing so much as an (at times) divinely inspired inebriety. He bounces from one form of writing to the next (poetry, descriptive prose, vituperative essay) without so much as a feint of a segue. There is really no narrative form to speak of. It seems clear (to me at least) that Agee didn't know himself what he was doing at times, and the striking pictures of Evans never seem to connect in the way they should with Agee's prose. It's rather like the characters in James Dickey's Deliverence stumbled out into a swath of impoverished farmland to write a book and take some pictures rather than into a soon-to-be dammed up river to take an ill-advised canoe trip. (One is not surprised, somehow, to learn that Agee was one of Dickey's great literary heroes.) ....And yet, for all the muddle, or perhaps because of it, the book has a disconcerting charm that will not let one be. I don't know where to pinpoint it or how to analyze it. But it's there, like some mischievous elf standing before your eyes who will not leave no matter how many times you open and shut your eyes and shake your head...There is a paragraph in the "On The Porch" section toward the end of the book, describing a girl in the dawning of her sexuality: "A phase so unassailably beyond any meaning of tenderness and of trust, so like the opening of the first living upon the shining of the young earth in its first morning..." In the book's finest moments, in Agee's best sections of writing, we feel this painfully fleeting innocence and bliss wafting over the lives of the simple and hard-bitten tenant farmers, a presence almost physical amidst the cruel hardships they endure. Perhaps this is part of the book's mysterious hold on generations of readers.

In one of the most edifying ways, James Agee illustrates the life of the Southern tenant sharecropper in the Great Depression. Agee's writings coupled with the eloquent photography of one notable Walker Evans, distinguishes the book in a elite category unparalleled by few if any whatsoever. The circumstances the sharecropper endured during the Depression not only working the land but also at home with family was rigorous and was additionally exposed very thoroughly in Agee's writings. The book is a must read for anyone interested in the History of the Great Depression era/New Dealism. One other book of notable mention for those interested is Larry Nelson's- KING COTTON'S ADVOCATE.