Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 30

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Popular Culture Review

rooms, Mrs. O. S. and her husband were unable to pay their bills,
including $225 owed in annual taxes (pp. 16-17).
Also profiled by Dreiser was Frank Tuma, a painter who had
been out of work for five months. Tuma's son needed an operation, but
Tuma had no money and owed a $300 grocery bill. The hospital,
however, agreed with Tuma's proposal to work off the cost of his
son's operation. Another portrait took only one sentence to write:
"Then there was John Pitak, 43, of 183 High Avenue, who committed
suicide, leaving a wife and three children because he could not find
work" (pp. 16-18). Dreiser let the portraits speak for themselves,
although they provided emotional and spiritual impetus for later
chapters of Tragic America where objective reportage was replaced
by searing indictments against the avarice of corporate America (pp.
51 -8 4 ,8S-112).
The most experimental book of documentary journalism was
James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, an examination of the
lives of tenant farmers in the deep South in the Thirties. With
Agee's impressionistic writing style and Walker Evans' stark
photographs of rural poverty. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men stands
as a chronicle of social turmoil. Like Wilson, Anderson, and Dreiser,
Agee was more intrigued by the use of camera-like observation than
in fictional Invention. "In a novel," Agee wrote, "a house or person
has his meaning, his existence, entirely through me: his true meaning
is much huger. It is that he exists, in actual being, as you do and as I
do, and as no character of the imagination can possibly exist" (Agee,
1941, p. 12). However, Agee refused to be constrained by the rigorous
objectivity that permeated the documentaries of Wilson and
Anderson. Instead, Agee infused his reportage with autobiographical
passages, philosophical discussions, and social and political
observations. He described in detail the impoverished living
conditions of the sharecroppers, but he was not content to let the facts
speak for themselves. Agee considered it his obligation to reflect
honestly and intuitively on the meaning of the social misery he
witnessed firsthand. Pells noted that although Agee could not make
expatiation for the pain of the tenant farmers, he at least "might
preserve his own autonomy while writing of the tenants with
honesty, clarity, understanding, and love" (Pells, 1973, p. 249).
In examining the daily living of three tenant families, Agee
dispensed with chronological progression. He wanted the structure of