Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' New Deal work uses the large format, 8 × 10-inch (200×250 mm) view camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent".
James Rufus Agee was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, writing for Time, he was one of the most influential film critics in the United States. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize. Agee is also known as a co-writer of the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and as the screenwriter of the film classics The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter.
Sharecropping is a legal arrangement in which a landowner allows a tenant (sharecropper) to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping is not to be conflated with tenant farming, providing the tenant a higher economic and social status.
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a New Deal agency created in 1937 to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression in the United States. It succeeded the Resettlement Administration (1935–1937).
The Tender Land is an opera with music by Aaron Copland and libretto by Horace Everett, a pseudonym for Erik Johns.
Dale Maharidge is an American author, journalist and academic best known for his collaborations with photographer Michael Williamson.
Sherrie Levine is an American photographer, painter, and conceptual artist. Some of her work consists of exact photographic reproductions of the work of other photographers such as Walker Evans, Eliot Porter and Edward Weston.
Keith Carter is an American photographer, educator, and artist noted for his dreamlike photos of people, animals and objects.
Connie Rose Porter is an African-American writer of young-adult books, and a teacher of creative writing. Porter is best known for her contribution to the American Girl Collection Series as the author of the Addy books: six of her Addy books have gone on to sell more than 3 million copies. In addition, she published two novels with Houghton-Mifflin, All-Bright Court (1991), and Imani All Mine (1999).
The Southerner is a 1945 American drama film directed by Jean Renoir and based on the 1941 novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry. The film received Oscar nominations for Best Director, Original Music Score, and Sound. Renoir was named Best Director by the National Board of Review, which also named the film the third best of 1945. The film portrays the hardships of a poor family struggling to establish a cotton farm in Texas in the early 1940s.
Julie Moos is a Canadian photographer and art writer.
Ned Cobb (1885–1973) was an African-American tenant farmer born in Tallapoosa County in Alabama. He joined the Sharecroppers' Union (SCU) in 1931, which was founded the same year.
Robert Coles is an American author, child psychiatrist, and professor emeritus at Harvard University.
Michael Sragow is an American film critic and columnist who has written for The Orange County Register, The Baltimore Sun, Film Comment, the San Francisco Examiner, The New Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Salon.com. Sragow also edited James Agee's film essays, and has written or contributed to several other cinema-related books.
And Their Children After Them, written by Dale Maharidge, photographed by Michael Williamson, and published by Pantheon Books in 1989, won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. An updated 30th anniversary edition was published by Seven Stories Press in 2019. There is an initial overview of the white sharecropper families living during the Great Depression who were profiled in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The book goes on to follow these families into the current era. One finds out how the older generation died, and what happened to the children and grandchildren of the men and women in "Let us Now Praise Famous Men." The author also discusses what happened to the average non-white sharecropper and their family through the years. He notes that at the time of publishing only one member of all the families covered in the earlier work had been able to go to college, and that while the families are no longer dirt poor, they had not moved up in the social or economic ladder in a meaningful way.
"Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves (or how I slugged it out with Lou Reed and stayed awake)" is an infamous interview with Lou Reed conducted by Lester Bangs and published in Creem magazine in 1975. It is now regarded as a classic document of music journalism. The title is a play on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book by James Agee. The full interview was reprinted in the New Musical Express in November 2013, as a tribute to Lou Reed, who died the previous month.
Sprott is an unincorporated community in Perry County, Alabama, United States. It is located at the intersection of Alabama Highways 14, and 183, northeast of Marion.
Wilder Hobson was an American writer and editor for Time (1930s-1940s), Fortune (1940s), Harper's Bazaar (1950s), and Newsweek (1960s) magazines. He was also a competent musician (trombone), author of an history of American jazz, and long-time contributor to Saturday Review magazine. Also, he served on the planning committee of the Institute of Jazz Studies.
George Whalley was a scholar, poet, naval officer and secret intelligence agent during World War II, CBC broadcaster, musician, biographer, and translator. He taught English at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario (1950–80) and was twice the head of the department. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1959. He married Elizabeth Watts on July 25, 1944. They had three children: Katharine, Christopher, and Emily. His brother, Peter Whalley, was a famous artist and cartoonist.
The Morning Watch is a short autobiographical novel which author James Agee began writing in 1947. Completing the text in 1950, Agee wrote to John Huston that the protagonist was a "12-year-old boy at edge of puberty, peak of certain kinds of hypersensitive introversion, isolation, and a certain priggishness."
