ABSTRACT
Rural poverty was one of the critical social problems of the depression but also the occasion for some of the decade's most memorable words and images. The New Deal changed the face of rural America on many fronts, through agencies such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Rural Electrification Administration. Through the Subsistence Homestead Division of the National Recovery Administration, the New Deal built about a hundred new communities in the early years of the Roosevelt administration. The federal government had appointed a committee to study farm tenancy in 1936. Its report led to the passage of the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy Act of l937, which created the new Farm Security Administration (FSA). James Agee's self-lacerating complexity as person and artist was one basis for his failure. The shrewd and sensitive Evans, whose pictures convey the restrained immediacy missing from Agee's prose, saw his writing as, among other things, the reflection of one resolute, private rebellion.
