Showing You Have Seen Their Faces by Erskine Caldwell

In the middle years of the Great Depression, Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White spent eighteen months traveling across the back roads of the Deep South - from South Carolina to Arkansas - to document the living conditions of the sharecropper. Their collaboration resulted in You Have Seen their Faces, a graphic portrayal of America's desperately poor rural underclass. First published in 1937, it is a classic comparable to Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which it preceded by more than three years.