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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Essay

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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” was written by James Agee and Walker Evans. The story is about three white families of tenant farmers in rural Alabama. The photographs in the beginning have no captions or quotations. They are just images of three tenant farming families, their houses, and possessions. “The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative.” (87) The story and the photographs contain relationships between them; in the essay I am going to inform you about the interpretations of the relationships between the readings of James Agee and some of the pictures by Walker Evans. …show more content…

This oil is not all oleaginous, but thin, brittle, rusty feeling, and sharp; taken and rubbed between forefinger and thumb it so cleanses their grain that it sharpens their mutual touch to a new coin edge.(102)
In the picture on page (31) you see a small, wooden room, in the middle of this room is a sturdy table with a peculiar tablecloth upon it; on this sturdy table is a small, glass, oil burning lamp. The lamp’s oil, interpreted to be their lives, hopes, and dreams. This oil is either half full or half empty; surely I believe it is half full. In the reading, the lamp’s oil signifies life, hope, security and safety. James Agee places these things at the center of the family’s existence. This shows that the author of “The Country Letter” places high respect towards these aspects in life. Their goals were to live life to the fullest, no one else, but themselves could make them happy.
Of such ultimate, such holiness of silence and peace that all on earth and within extremest remembrance seems suspended upon it in perfection as upon reflected water: and I feel that if I can by utter quietness succeed in not disturbing this silence, in not so much as touching this plain of water, I can tell you anything within the realm of God. (104)
This quotation signifies the belief that James Agee is cradling something so perfect and delicate that just by whispering its existence, he may just shatter the beauty. In the

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