James Agee & Walker Evans. 
 
Houghton Mifflin: 1941. First edition. Hardcover in a jacket. Octavo. Significant tears along the folds, top, and bottom of the jacket. Back flap detached. Soling on the back panel. Fading on the corners of the boards of the book. Dampstain on the back board. Minor foxing on the top edge of the text block. Bumping on the corners and along the edges of the bottom of the boards. Minor fading and soiling on the attached endpapers. Fold down the leaves you can see for the first 20 pages and feel for the next 250. Dampstains on a few of the leaves in the first 50 pages.  Pencil markings down the margins on 2 pages. 471 pages. Jacket good, book very good. 
 
Agee and Evans went in 1936 to live with three tenant families in Alabama. Agee took notes on and Evans photographed people whose lives, though their own, mirrored the experiences of millions. After years of reflection on how to present such glimpses of the sharecropping Great Depression South, the first edition of a "violent and beautiful" book was published. 
 
“To come devotedly into the depths of a subject, your respect for it increasing in every step and your whole heart weakening apart with shame upon yourself in your dealing with it : To know at length better and better and at length into the bottom of your soul your unworthiness of it : Let me hope in any case that it is something to have begun to learn.”