And Their Children After Them

In the summer of 1936, James Agee and photographer Walker Evans lived among three tenant farming families in Alabama and turned what they saw into Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, one of the most studied works of Depression era American nonfiction. Roughly half a century later, writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael Williamson set out to find the same families and their descendants, tracing what had actually happened to them and to the cotton economy that had shaped their lives, across decades that included depopulation of the rural South, mechanization of farm work and the slow collapse of the sharecropping system Agee and Evans had documented.

Maharidge and Williamson work in the same paired text and photograph form Agee and Evans used, following individual family members into old age, into new towns, and in some cases into a poverty little changed from what Agee had described, even as the cotton economy itself had all but disappeared around them. The book treats the original families less as historical curiosities than as a way of asking a live question, what actually happens to rural American poverty once the crop and the system that created it are gone, and the answer it finds is neither simple decline nor simple improvement.

Reading it means holding the original 1941 book in mind as a constant point of comparison, and it rewards a reader already familiar with Agee and Evans's project, though it stands on its own as a work of documentary journalism about generational poverty in the rural South. It suits anyone interested in how American economic change actually lands on specific families over the very long run rather than in a single generation.