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James Agee

James Agee was an American poet, novelist, film critic, screenwriter, and magazine journalist who died in 1955. Agee’s Cotton Tenants was published by The Baffler and Melville House in 2013.

Landowners

An excerpt from James Agee’s Cotton Tenants (1936), published by Melville House and The Baffler. The essential structure of the South is, of course, economic: cold and inevitable
as the laws of chemistry. But that is not how the machine is run. The machine is run on ...
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Cotton Tenants

January 21, 2014
James Agee submitted this previously unpublished article about tenant farmers in Alabama to Fortune Magazine, where he was a staff writer, in 1936. Fortune rejected the article, for reasons unknown, and Agee expanded it into Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was published in ...