When we think about our lives, we often focus on how they can be better without taking the time to appreciate what we already have. James Agee had the opportunity to go on a journalism assignment to South Alabama during the Great Depression. This caused him to write the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
In the book, Coles emphasizes Agee’s feeling of being an outsider in the presence of the farmers. Agee is trying to understand his location as he is writing the novel. Agee is trying to truthfully represent someone else’s world, a world that is not his own. This is the moral crisis that is spoken about in the chapter. As Coles says on page 27, “Both Agee and Orwell seem to know that they are in uncertain territory as they try to address their audience.” They were sent to a location where they are the odd ones out, instead of these farmers who would be the outliers in almost any other place.
In my home in New Jersey, I went through a similar but opposite situation as well. I grew up in Trenton, NJ, with immigrant parents from Guatemala. Trenton is full of people who look just like me and act like me. My parents enrolled me in a private school that was known for being expensive, where only the rich people live. This was what I was getting ready for. When I first showed up at Princeton Day School, I was the only Hispanic student in my class. I was in a location that I was never used to, with so much new technology that PDS had. My old school never had anything like this. I was trying to adapt and understand the place I was going to spend my next 10 years of education at. I felt like an outsider as Agee felt when he went to south Alabama on his mission.
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