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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Rationale
- Agee's description of the book for a Guggenheim application: "as exhaustive a reproduction and analysis of personal experience, including the phases and problems of memory and recall and revisitation and the problems of writing and of communication, as I am capable of, with constant bearing on two points: to tell everything possible as accurately as possible, and to invent nothing. It involves therefore as total a suspicion of 'creative' and 'artistic' as of 'reportorial' attitudes and methods, and it is likely therefore to involve the development of some more or less new forms of writing and observation"
- Agee's approach: "anti-artistic, anti-scientific, anti-journalistic"
- His purpose: to "create an image of the very essence of their lives" (Agee 319)
- LUNPFM deliberately "not a work of entertainments" (Agee 111)
- Originally titled "Cotton Tenants: Three Families"; "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" taken from Ecclesiasticus 44:15
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