In the January 2026 issue, two essays explore James Agee and Walker Evans’s notable book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). The book presents an ironic reversal of the Biblical line, which starts, “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” Agee’s text and Evan’s photographs instead describe and document poor, unknown sharecroppers, those farthest from being “famous,” who were worthy of praise for their quiet lives of dignity and hard work.

Perhaps this mode of questioning accepted verities is the umbrella under which we can place the rest of the contents of this issue. Across the print edition and the current Print Plus cycle, there is a distinct collection of canonical names: Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others. However, several of these pieces focus on the “behind-the-scenes” mechanics of how the canon was built and maintained, as well as on the legal and ethical labor involved.

Highlights from Print Plus include:

• Hartmann-Villalta’s review of the 2024 exhibition at the George Peabody Library (Gertrude Stein in Circles: Spheres of Life and Writing). It notes how traditional hierarchies of valuation can be overturned by creating new visual narratives, integrating "low" fan culture with "high" art, and centering a queer framework.
• A piece by Vincent Hiscock on Robert Duncan’s poetry regarding the reactivation of a distinctive kind of Whitmanian faith in the face of the Vietnam War.

Do look out for the print teasers from the issue, starting next week with Robert Spoo’s essay, “The Dispossessing of Sylvia Beach: Property, Autonomy, Personhood”  which places Sylvia Beach and her labor at the center of the story that is usually only narrated from the perspective of James Joyce, the famous man.

I hope you enjoy these diverse takes on the canon.

—Anjali Nerlekar