“A Note On Sources and Further Reading”

from Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America (FSG, 2021)

Much of my account of the Federal Writers’ Project is derived from research in two main archives. The National Archives at College Park, Maryland, contain the bulk of the FWP’s administrative records and correspondence, as well as some manuscripts, housed there alongside the vast archival holdings from the WPA. The Library of Congress in Washington, DC, contains a great deal of manuscripts and related research material, along with some correspondence, other official documents, and the papers of Katharine Kellock. There are FWP records scattered across the states as well, sometimes in multiple locations. (For instance, I’ve drawn on material from the Illinois project held by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield.) All of these records belong to the public, and they are available for the public to explore. I’ve also consulted a number of personal archives, including the papers of Jerre Mangione at the University of Rochester, where his research material on the FWP is deposited.

In addition to these archives, I’ve benefited just as much from the many writers and scholars who, over the past half century, have themselves told the story of the FWP or investigated a particular aspect of it. Below is a limited selection of the books that I’ve found useful in crafting my own account, and that will reward further reading. (This is to say nothing about the essays, reviews, book catalogs, and unpublished dissertations—and of course, the FWP publications themselves—available for even further reading.)

Jerre Mangione’s The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–1943 (1972) is the first book about the FWP and arguably the most essential. Mangione, the project’s former national coordinating editor, combines memoir and history in an indispensable if occasionally meandering account. Monty Noam Penkower’s The Federal Writers’ Project: A Study in Government Patronage of the Arts (1977) is a crisp and detailed administrative history. Both were preceded by William F. McDonald’s Federal Relief Administration and the Arts: The Origins and Administrative History of the Arts Projects of the Works Progress Administration (1969), which covers all of Federal #1 and is of primary interest to specialists.

Others have considered the FWP as a whole, but from distinct perspectives and in pursuit of different concerns. Christine Bold’s The WPA Guides: Mapping America (1999) examines and critiques the process through which the guidebooks were created, by way of several case studies. Jerrold Hirsch’s Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project (2003) delves into the attitudes and ideals of the FWP’s key architects. David A. Taylor’s Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America (2009) presents an overview of how a number of federal writers experienced their time on the project; it was published in conjunction with the documentary Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story (2009), produced and directed by Andrea Kalin. And Wendy Griswold’s American Guides: The Federal Writers’ Project and the Casting of American Culture (2016) takes a sociological approach toward understanding the cultural impact of the guidebooks.

Several studies of individual state projects offer a glimpse of how the FWP operated in local settings: Christine Bold’s Writers, Plumbers, and Anarchists: The WPA Writers’ Project in Massachusetts (2006), Paul Sporn’s Against Itself: The Federal Theater and Writers’ Projects in the Midwest (1995), George T. Blakey’s Creating a Hoosier Self-Portrait: The Federal Writers’ Project in Indiana, 1935–1942 (2005), and Marilyn Irvin Holt’s Nebraska During the New Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project in the Cornhusker State (2019).

Two valuable thematic studies are Catherine A. Stewart’s Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project (2016), which pays special attention to the narratives of formerly enslaved people, and Sara Rutkowski’s Literary Legacies of the Federal Writers’ Project: Voices of the Depression in the American Postwar Era (2017), which explores the FWP’s influence on the development of creative writing in the United States between the Depression and the postwar era.

Quite a few collections of unpublished FWP material have appeared in the decades since the project’s demise, and as scholars continue to mine the archives, more are certain to be published. Some noteworthy examples include the testimonials assembled in First-Person America (1980), edited by Ann Banks, and Such As Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties (1978), edited by Tom E. Terrill and Jerrold Hirsch, as well as the narratives of formerly enslaved people selected for Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, edited by Benjamin A. Botkin (1945). The only book devoted to the work of a single federal writer, as far as I can tell, is Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers’ Project (1999), edited by Pamela Bordelon (who also contributed an illuminating essay). The “America Eats” project, to which Nelson Algren was assigned, has spawned something of a cottage industry: there is The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food—Before the National Highway System, Before the Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation’s Food Was Seasonal, Regional, and Traditional—from the Lost WPA Files (2009), edited and illustrated by Mark Kurlansky; Algren’s own posthumous America Eats (1992), edited by David E. Schoonover; Pat Willard’s tribute to the original, America Eats! On the Road with the WPA; The Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food (2008); and Camille Bégin’s scholarly study Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for America’s Food (2016).

Less easy to categorize are Geoffrey O’Gara’s enjoyable travelogue A Long Road Home: In the Footsteps of the WPA Writers (1989) and Jason Boog’s The Deep End: The Literary Scene in the Great Depression and Today (2020), the latter of which considers the FWP alongside reflections on the economic struggles of writers past and present. Readers interested in the story of the WPA as a whole would do well to consult Nick Taylor’s American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work (2008).

Another excellent resource for exploring the legacy of the WPA, and much else besides, is the Living New Deal, an ever-expanding, online repository of information and images (livingnewdeal.org). And worthy of special mention is Susan Rubenstein DeMasi’s sensitive and thorough biography Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project (2016). Of the many secondary sources that examine the culture of the 1930s, three books I found highly valuable for situating and understanding the FWP are Richard H. Pells’s Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (1973), William Stott’s Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1973), and Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1997).

Although not about the FWP per se, State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (2008), edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, assembles an exceptional group of writers who each contribute an essay on a different state; the collection is both a tribute to the FWP and a demonstration that, well into the twenty-first century, the project continues to inspire.

Finally, for the reader who is curious about my Old Uncle Fred, I direct you to his cameo in Nicholas A. Basbanes’s A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (1995).