As with The Crime of Cuba (1933), this book originated with literary agent Ernestine Evans, who had wanted to engage Walker Evans in another project. Karl Bickel, a retired journalist, was writing a history of the Gulf Coast of Florida, and Ernestine unequivocally recommended Walker, who needed the money; his 1940 Guggenheim Fellowship was running out, and sales of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men had been disappointing. He had also recently married and saw the six-week Florida trip as an opportunity to combine work with his honeymoon. These photographs are probably the least-known of Walker Evans's pre-1945 photographs; the few existing prints are mostly held at the Getty Museum, and the publishers removed Evans's photographs from this book's second and subsequent editions.

First edition; 8vo (212 x 141 mm, 8¼ x 5½ in); black-and-white photographs in relief halftone, design by Robert Josephy, orange topstain; plain endpapers, minor browning, grey-green cloth-covered boards, photo-illustrated title-label printed in orange and black mounted on front, similar label without the illustration mounted on spine, light spotting, spine lightly toned through the jacket, photo-illustrated dust-jacket printed in red and black, lightly toned and rubbed, minor fading to spine, light wear to edges, light foxing and small adhesive strip on verso, corner of two flaps turned, a very good copy; viii, 312, 32pp.