And Their Children After Them

In And Their Children After Them, the writer/photographer team Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson return to the land and families captured in James Agee and Walker Evans’s inimitable Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, extending the project of conscience and chronicling the traumatic decline of King Cotton. With this continuation of Agee and Evans’s project, Maharidge and Williamson not only uncover some surprising historical secrets relating to the families and to Agee himself, but also effectively lay to rest Agee’s fear that his work, from lack of reverence or resilience, would be but another offense to the humanity of its subjects. Williamson’s ninety-part photo essay includes updates alongside Evans’s classic originals. Maharidge and Williamson’s work in And Their Children After Them was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction when it was first published in 1990.

Dale Maharidge has been a visiting professor of journalism at Columbia University and Stanford and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1998. His latest book is Homeland (Seven Stories Press,2004). He lives in New York and California.

Michael Williamson is a photographer for the Washington Post who won a second Pulitzer for his coverage of the plight of Kosovo refugees. He lives in Washington,DC.