Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 36

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Popular Culture Review

romantic notions of individualism. Agee was more concerned with
examining the day-to-day lives of real people who had been left out
of the American Dream. Despite his camera-like approach to
reportage and reliance on the objective gathering of social facts, there
was a quiet rage in Agee's narration. By living with and closely
observing the Alabama sharecroppers of his book, Agee came to
understand more than the sorrow and dignity of those living on the
fringes of the American Dream; he also recognized that the American
malady of the twentieth century was complacency. Agee wrote:
"...th e persistence of what once was insufficiently described as Pride,
a mortal sin, can quite as coldly and inevitably damage and wreck
the human race as the most total power of 'Greed' ever could: and
that socially anyhow, the most dangerous form of pride is neither
arrogance nor humility, but its mild, common denominator form,
complacency" (Agee, 1941, pp. 249-250).
As a humanist striving to bring a flesh and blood realism to
the printed page, Agee recognized the need for the writer to avoid
the very complacency plaguing the country. "I 'conceive of' my work
as an effort to be faithful to my perceptions," he said. "I am not
interested in expressing myself as an individual except when it is
suggested that I express someone else." Agee concluded that his
responsibilities as a writer and as a human being were identical (p.
357).
Condusion
Frustrated by what they perceived to be the inadequacies of
fiction in analyzing the Depression experience, Edmund Wilson,
Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and James Agee experimented
with book-length documentary journalism. In their search for the
social fact, they traveled extensively across the country in the
Thirties, observing and talking with common people who lived on the
outskirts of the American Dream. The documentarians believed that
the most effective way to learn about the Depression was to talk
with the factory workers, the unemployed, the farmers, the union
members on strike, and the hitchhikers in search of work. In
documenting social disorder, Wilson, Anderson, Dreiser, and Agee
employed a rigorous objectivity that hinged on detailed descriptions
of people, places, and events. If the subject at hand was impoverished
living conditions, strike violence, or suicide attempts, the writers