Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 1990
In And Their Children After Them, 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 is a journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of And Their Children After Them, Journey to Nowhere, The Last Great American Hobo, and Homeland. A professor of journalism at Columbia University, he lives in Northern California and New York City.
Michael S. Williamson is a photographer for the Washington Post who, in addition to the Pulitzer Prize he shares with Dale Maharidge for their book on Depression-era sharecroppers, has won a second Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of war in Kosovo. Williamson’s other honors include the World Press Photo and Nikon World Understanding Through Photography awards. He lives in Maryland.
