In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Now Praise Famous Men, a 400-page document on three tenant farmer families in Hale County, Alabama, in the midst of the Great Depression. The origin of that wonderful work is a previous commission for Fortune magazine, which sent them together to Alabama in the summer of 1936 to report a story that was never published. Some have assumed that Fortune's publishers filed the story for the unconventional style that marked "famous men," and for years, the original was allegedly lost. Fifty years after Agee's death, a machine copy was discovered among his manuscripts, labeled "Algodoneros". The pages reveal a 30,000-word master report that shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Critics considered it the "most realistic and most important moral effort of our generation."

First published in Spanish, and accompanied by historical photographs by Walker Evans, it is an eloquent report of three families fighting in desperate times. In fact, Agee's libel remains relevant, as one of the most honest explorations ever attempted on poverty in the United States and as a founding journalism document.