Depression Classic Brought Poverty Into the Light

In 2013, poverty isn’t hard to find in America -- from decayed inner cities to the camps of agricultural migrant workers. But unless you seek it out, it’s very easy to forget. We always prefer stories of great success -- Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett -- to the much more numerous, if less inspiring or reassuring, stories of failure.

The first task of a writer aiming to bring poverty out of the shadows, then, is simply to remind prosperous Americans that the poor exist -- not in the abstract, as statistics, but in all their humanity. No writer has ever committed himself more fully to this task than James Agee, in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”