In 1936
Fortune magazine sent staff writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans to do an article on cotton sharecroppers. Agee wrote a long article (30,000 words) on three red dirt tenant farmers in Hale County, Alabama.
Fortune never published the article. I'm surprised that the editors ever assigned such a topic to James Agee, given some of the the sentiments he expressed in the article; here is a sample:
... a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer,and the scavengers of the deepsea.
Not words that would have been comforting to the readership of
Fortune.
Agee and Walker eventually published
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men about the sharecroppers, but the original article was never published until as a short book this year, 58 years after Agee's early death.
I read the book yesterday. It is a wonderful, unsentimental description of the costs of feudalism on the serfs.
You can find it here
http://www.amazon.com/Cotton-Tenants...ies-James-Agee