These Vivid American Documents: Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and FSA Photobooks

＂This book is an analysis of a unique genre of books created by the Farm Security Administration when it paired up a well-known writer with a photographer and set them loose on interpreting some feature of contemporary American culture. Doubtless the most famous of these is James Agee and Walker Evans’s Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, but there were a half-dozen others that are deserving of attention. The book goes into some detail about how the FSA came to commission these, what the daily working conditions of the projects were like, then provides close analysis of the meaning of the texts/photos. It is accompanied by 32 images by Evans, Dorothea Lange, and other photographers who achieved fame documenting the Great Depression＂--

JOSEPH R. MILLICHAP is emeritus professor of English at Western Kentucky University. He is the author of The Language of Vision: Photography and Southern Literature in the 1930s and After; A Backward Glance: The Southern Renascence, the Autobiographical Epic, and the Classical Legacy; and Robert Penn Warren, Shadowy Autobiography, and Other Makers of American Literature.