How long does it take to read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men?
three tenant families
James Agee, Walker Evans
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee, Walker Evans takes about 8 hours 38 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 38 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1941. 471 pages, about 129,525 words.
18 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 14 hours 24 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 38 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 24 minutes |
The page count is the median across 24 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book with text by American writer James Agee and photographs by American photographer Walker Evans, first published in 1941 in the United States. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men grew out of an assignment the two men accepted in 1936 to produce a Fortune magazine article on the conditions among sharecropper families in the American South during the "Dust Bowl". It was the time of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" programs designed to help the poorest segments of the society. Agee and Evans spent eight weeks that summer researching their assignment, mainly among three white sharecropping families mired in desperate poverty. They returned with Evans' portfolio of stark images—of families with gaunt faces, adults and children huddled in bare shacks before dusty yards in the Depression-era nowhere of the deep south—and Agee's detailed notes. As he remarks in the book's preface, the original assignment was to produce a "photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers". However, as the Literary Encyclopedia points out, "Agee ultimately conceived of the project as a work of several volumes to be entitled Three Tenant Families, though only the first volume, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was ever written". Agee considered that the larger work, though based in journalism, would be "an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity"
Subjects: History, Rural conditions, Farm tenancy, Fiction, Description and travel, Social conditions
