[5] After spending a year in Paris in 1926, he returned to the United States to join a literary and art crowd in New York City.

There, Evans drank nightly with Ernest Hemingway, who lent him money to extend his two-week stay an additional week.

His photographs documented street life, the presence of police, beggars and dockworkers in rags, and other waterfront scenes.

Fearing that his photographs might be deemed critical of the government and confiscated by Cuban authorities, he left 46 prints with Hemingway.

In June 1935, he accepted a job from the U.S. Department of the Interior to photograph a government-built resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia.

[11] From October 1935 on, he continued to do photographic work for the RA and later the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the Southern United States.

In November 1935, he visited the industrial hub of the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania, capturing photos of Bethlehem Steel.

[12] In the summer of 1936, while on leave from the FSA, writer James Agee and he were sent by Fortune on assignment to Hale County, Alabama for a story the magazine subsequently opted not to run.

In 1941, Evans' photographs and Agee's text detailing the duo's stay with three White tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression were published as the groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Critic Janet Malcolm notes that a contradiction existed between a kind of anguished dissonance in Agee's prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans' photographs of sharecroppers.

[14] In 1936, Walker Evans, employed by the National Recovery Administration photographed three impoverished sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama.

The three families headed by Bud Fields, Floyd Burroughs, and Frank Tingle, lived in the Hale County town of Akron, Alabama, and the owners of the land on which the families worked told them that Evans and Agee were "Soviet agents", although Allie Mae Burroughs, Floyd's wife, recalled during later interviews her discounting that information.

That year, an exhibition, Walker Evans: American Photographs, was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Like such other photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Evans rarely spent time in the darkroom making prints from his own negatives.

Between 1940 and 1959, Walker Evans was awarded three Guggenheim Fellowships in Photography to continue his work of making record photographs of contemporary American subjects.