''And Their Children After Them'' (; subtitled ''The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South''), written by Dale Maharidge, photographed by Michael Williamson, and published by

Pantheon Books Pantheon Books is an American book publishing imprint. Founded in 1942 as an independent publishing house in New York City by Kurt and Helen Wolff, it specialized in introducing progressive European works to American readers. In 1961, it was ...

in 1989, won the 1990

Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction The Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are awarded annually for the "Letters, Drama, and Music" category. The award is given to a nonfiction book written by an American author and published du ...

. An updated 30th anniversary edition was published by

Seven Stories Press Seven Stories Press is an independent American publishing company. Based in New York City, the company was founded by Dan Simon in 1995, after establishing Four Walls Eight Windows in 1984 as an imprint at Writers and Readers, and then incorpor ...

in 2019. There is an initial overview of the white

sharecropper Sharecropping is a legal arrangement in which a landowner allows a tenant (sharecropper) to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping is not to be conflated with tenant farming, providing the tenant a ...

families living during the

Great Depression The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty, drastic reductions in industrial production and international trade, and widespread bank and ...

who were profiled in ''

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ''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. The work documents the lives of impoverished tenant farmers ...

''. The book goes on to follow these families into the current era. One finds out how the older generation died, and what happened to the children and grandchildren of the men and women in "Let us Now Praise Famous Men." The author also discusses what happened to the average non-white sharecropper and their family through the years. He notes that at the time of publishing only one member of all the families covered in the earlier work had been able to go to college (and that that person was more than 30 years old at time of graduation), and that while the families are no longer dirt poor, they had not moved up in the social or economic ladder in a meaningful way.

References

External links

* 1989 non-fiction books American history books Non-fiction books about the Great Depression Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction–winning works Pantheon Books books {{US-hist-book-stub