American Decades
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Photographs
By: Walker Evans
Date: 1941
Source: Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.
About the Artist: Walker Evans (1903–1975) was a photographer, writer, and teacher. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he graduated from Phillips Academy and spent a year at Williams College. His interest in documentary photography led him to record city streets, American nineteenth-century architecture of buildings and homes, and the people and places of the rural South, especially during the Great Depression. He worked for Fortune magazine for twenty years and then taught graphic design at Yale University for ten years.
Introduction
Early on, Walker Evans wanted to be a writer and a painter. He spent a year in Paris auditing courses at the Sorbonne and reading Gustave Flaubert and Charles-Pierre Baudelaire. After...
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1940's The Arts Primary Sources
- "The Aims of Music for Films"
- "The Irresponsibles"
- Speech on the Dedication of the National Gallery of Art
- "I Got it Bad (and that Ain't Good)"
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
- "The Life of John Brown" Series, No. 17
- What Is Modern Painting
- On the Town Caricature
- "Richard Wright's Blues"
- The Iceman Cometh
- "What Hollywood Can Do"
- "The Gangster As Tragic Hero"
- "Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?"
- William Faulkner's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
- "The American Theatre"
- Copyright Page
- Acknowledgments
