Romantic Reverence and Modernist Representation: Vision, Power, and the Shattered Form of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Formally and stylistically, Famous Men has to be one of the most flamboyantly modernist compositions in English, and yet it seldom appears in accounts of American modernism or in discussions of the modernism/realism oppositions of the 1930s.This cannot be wholly explained by the text's generic classification: modernist studies has readily extended its borders to include nonfictional texts, including 1930s reportage and the productions of the Mass Observation project in England. [...] in this respect Famous Men's insistent materialism is at least as important a precedent for contemporary documentary as is its self-reflexivity, for it serves to remind audiences not just of their relative power but of their equal vulnerabuity and equal dependence on material security to hold them free of an existence wholly governed by organic compulsion and necessity.