Federal Writers' Project
Encyclopedia
The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was a United States federal government project to fund written work and support writers during the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

. It was part of the Works Progress Administration
Works Progress Administration
The Works Progress Administration was the largest and most ambitious New Deal agency, employing millions of unskilled workers to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads, and operated large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects...

, a New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...

 program. It was one of a group of New Deal arts programs known collectively as Federal One
Federal One
Federal Project Number One was the collective name for a group of projects under the Work Projects Administration, a New Deal program in the United States. The five elements of the program were:*Mathematical Tables Project*Harry Hopkins-External links:...

.

Background

Established on July 27, 1935 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) operated under journalist and theatrical producer Henry Alsberg, and later John D. Newsome, compiling local histories, oral histories, ethnographies, children's books and other works. The most well-known of these publications were the 48 state
U.S. state
A U.S. state is any one of the 50 federated states of the United States of America that share sovereignty with the federal government. Because of this shared sovereignty, an American is a citizen both of the federal entity and of his or her state of domicile. Four states use the official title of...

 guides to America (plus Alaska Territory
Alaska Territory
The Territory of Alaska was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from August 24, 1912, until January 3, 1959, when it was admitted to the Union as the State of Alaska...

, Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...

 and Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

) known as the American Guide Series
American Guide Series
The American Guide Series was a group of books and pamphlets published under the auspices of the Federal Writers' Project , a Depression-era works program in the United States. The American Guide Series books were compiled by the FWP, but printed by individual states, and contained detailed...

. The American Guide Series books were compiled by the FWP, but printed by individual states, and contained detailed histories of each state with descriptions of every city and town. The format was uniform, comprising essays on the state's history and culture, descriptions of its major cities, automobile tours of important attractions, and a portfolio of photographs. The Federal Writers Project was funded and put to work, as a Public Works in and around the west coast, through Washington, Oregon and California.

FWP was charged with employing writers, editors, historians, researchers, art critics, archaeologists, geologist
Geologist
A geologist is a scientist who studies the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth as well as the processes and history that has shaped it. Geologists usually engage in studying geology. Geologists, studying more of an applied science than a theoretical one, must approach Geology using...

s and cartographers. Some 6,600 individuals were employed by the FWP. In each state a Writer's Project non-relief staff of editors was formed, along with a much larger group of field workers drawn from local unemployment rolls. Many of these had never graduated high school, but most had formerly held white collar jobs of some sort. Most of the Writer's Project employees were relatively young in age, and many came from working-class backgrounds.

Some FWP writers supported the labor movement and left-wing social and political themes. The rise of fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...

 and the emerging opposition to Roosevelt administration policies by conservative critics led many WPA artists to voice a political position. Most Writers' Project works were apolitical by their nature, but some histories and ethnographies were not. Some projects were strongly opposed by some state legislatures, particularly the American Guide Series books, and in a few states Guide printings were kept to a minimal number of copies. Projects included interviews which led to slave narratives based on the experiences of former slaves with the work culminating in over 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves.

Some of the work was "a socially-conscious art" in the sense that "these were not attempts to sugar-coat the lives of the authentic 'folk' in the realm of culture. Such projects were designed to effect an increased political awareness of the plight of sharecroppers, migrants, and the American proletariat" yet were nevertheless part of a "documentary trend" infused with "intense regionalism and celebration of the working class" with a turn away from European style, seeing "stylistic experimentation and a cosmopolitan imagination as socially-irresponsible indulgences not to be entertained in such times of national crisis" and embracing socially relevant facts and "national realism," noted Mark Krasovic writing for the New Deal Network, a project of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in collaboration with Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Marist College, and IBM, adding,

"The times had provided a human drama of immense proportions; there was no need to invent circumstances. Thus, many fiction writers turned toward 'documenting' the common people, those who suffered most brutally the effects of the Depression. The results were such books as Jack Conroy's The Disinherited
The Disinherited
The Disinherited is a proletarian novel written by Jack Conroy. It was published in 1933. Conroy wrote it initially as nonfiction, but editors insisted he fictionalize the story for better audience reception...

 and John Steinbeck's
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...

 enduring classic The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath is a novel published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962....

."


Thousands worked on the project, including several well-known authors. Blakey (2005) estimates that at any one time the Indiana office had no fewer than 150 men and women on the payroll. Fieldworkers made about $
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....

80 a month, working 20 to 30 hours a week. A majority were women. Very few African Americans worked for the state projects, with the notable exception of the Illinois Writers' Project. One of the few racially integrated Project sites, the Chicago project employed Arna Bontemps, an established voice of the Harlem Renaisaance, and helped to launch the literary careers of Richard Wright
Richard Wright (author)
Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African-Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries...

, Margaret Walker
Margaret Walker
Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander was an African-American poet and writer. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, she wrote as Margaret Walker. One of her best-known poems is For My People.-Biography:...

, Katherine Dunham
Katherine Dunham
Katherine Mary Dunham was an American dancer, choreographer, songwriter, author, educator, and activist...

, and Frank Yerby
Frank Yerby
Frank Garvin Yerby was an African American historical novelist. He is best known as the first African American writer to become a millionaire from his pen, and to have a book purchased by a Hollywood studio for a film adaptation.-Early life:...

 (Mangione 1972).

The overriding goal of the FWP was employment, but the project produced useful work in the many oral histories collected from residents throughout the United States, many from regions that had previously gone unexplored and unrecorded.

Federal sponsorship for the Federal Writers' Project came to an end in 1939, though the program was permitted to continue under state sponsorship until 1943. The program is nonexistent now.

Film

A National Endowment for the Humanities
National Endowment for the Humanities
The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...

-funded documentary about the Federal Writers Project, titled Soul of a People: Writing America's Story premiered on the Smithsonian Channel in September 2009. The film includes interviews with notable American authors Studs Terkel, Stetson Kennedy, and popular American historian Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley is an American author, professor of history at Rice University and a fellow at the James Baker Institute for Public Policy. Brinkley is the history commentator for CBS News and a contributing editor to the magazine Vanity Fair...

. The companion book was published by Wiley & Sons as Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America.

Unchained Memories
Unchained Memories
Unchained Memories is a 2003 documentary films about the stories of former slaves interviewed during the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project. This HBO film interpretation directed by Ed Bell and Thomas Lennon is a compilation of slave narratives, narrated by actors, emulating the...

 are the stories of former slaves interviewed during the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers Project. This HBO  film interpretation directed by Ed Bell and Thomas Lennon [10] is a compilation of slave narratives, narrated by actors, emulating the original conversation with the interviewer. The slave narratives may be the most accurate in terms of the everyday activities of the enslaved, serving as personal memoirs of more than two thousand former slaves. The documentary depicts the emotions of the slaves and what they endured. The "Master" had the opportunity to sell, trade, or kill the enslaved, for retribution should one slave not obey.

Notable FWP participants

  • Conrad Aiken
    Conrad Aiken
    Conrad Potter Aiken was an American novelist and poet, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, a play and an autobiography.-Early years:...

  • Nelson Algren
    Nelson Algren
    Nelson Algren was an American writer.-Early life:Algren was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Goldie and Gerson Abraham. At the age of three he moved with his parents to Chicago, Illinois where they lived in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood on the South Side...

  • William Attaway
    William Attaway
    William Alexander Attaway was an African American novelist, short story writer, essayist, songwriter, playwright, and screenwriter.-Early Life:...

  • Saul Bellow
    Saul Bellow
    Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...

  • Max Bodenheim
  • John Cheever
    John Cheever
    John William Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy,...

  • Loren Eiseley
    Loren Eiseley
    Loren Eiseley was an American anthropologist, educator, philosopher, and natural science writer, who taught and published books from the 1950s through the 1970s. During this period he received more than 36 honorary degrees and was a fellow of many distinguished professional societies...

  • Ralph Ellison
    Ralph Ellison
    Ralph Waldo Ellison was an American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953...

  • Vardis Fisher
    Vardis Fisher
    Vardis Alvero Fisher was a well-respected writer best known for historical novels of the old West and the monumental 12-volume Testament of Man series of novels, depicting the history of humans from cave to civilization....

  • Irving Fiske
    Irving Fiske
    Irving Fiske born Irving Fishman in Brooklyn, New York, was a playwright, inventor, freelance writer, and speaker...

     (Then Fishman)
  • Zora Neale Hurston
    Zora Neale Hurston
    Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance...


  • Weldon Kees
    Weldon Kees
    Harry Weldon Kees was an American poet, painter, literary critic, novelist, jazz pianist, and short story writer...

  • Claude McKay
    Claude McKay
    Claude McKay was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem , a best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo , and Banana Bottom...

  • John Steinbeck
    John Steinbeck
    John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...

  • May Swenson
    May Swenson
    Anna Thilda May "May" Swenson was an American poet and playwright...

  • Studs Terkel
    Studs Terkel
    Louis "Studs" Terkel was an American author, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War, and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.-Early...

  • Jim Thompson
    Jim Thompson (writer)
    James Myers Thompson was an American author and screenwriter, known for his pulp crime fiction....

  • Richard Wright
    Richard Wright (author)
    Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African-Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries...

  • Frank Yerby
    Frank Yerby
    Frank Garvin Yerby was an African American historical novelist. He is best known as the first African American writer to become a millionaire from his pen, and to have a book purchased by a Hollywood studio for a film adaptation.-Early life:...

  • Margaret Walker
    Margaret Walker
    Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander was an African-American poet and writer. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, she wrote as Margaret Walker. One of her best-known poems is For My People.-Biography:...

  • Dorothy West
    Dorothy West
    Dorothy West was a novelist and short story writer who was part of the Harlem Renaissance. She is best known for her novel The Living Is Easy, about the life of an upper-class black family.-Early years:...

  • Anzia Yezierska
    Anzia Yezierska
    Anzia Yezierska was a Polish-American novelist born in Maly Plock, Poland.- Personal life :Anzia Yezierska was born in the 1880s in Maly Plock to Bernard and Pearl Yezierski. Her family immigrated to America around 1890, following in the footsteps of her eldest brother Meyer, who arrived to the...



Further reading

  • Banks, Ann, ed., First-Person America, W.W. Norton, 1991, an anthology of oral history interviews collected by the Federal Writers Project.
  • Blakey, George T. Creating a Hoosier Self-Portrait: The Federal Writers' Project in Indiana, 1935-1942 Indiana University Press, 2005.
  • Brewer, Jeutonne P., The Federal Writers' Project: a bibliography, Metuchen, NH: Scarecrow Press, 1994.
  • Fleischhauer, Carl, and Beverly W. Brannan, eds., Documenting America, 1935-1943, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
  • Hirsch, Jerrold. Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers' Project (2003)
  • Kurlansky, Mark, The Food of a Younger Land, Penguin, NY, 2009.
  • Mangione, Jerre, The dream and the deal: the Federal Writers' Project, 1935-1943, Boston: Little, Brown, 1972.
  • Meltzer, Milton, Violins & shovels: the WPA arts projects, New York: Delacorte Press, 1976.
  • Penkower, Monty Noam, The Federal Writers' Project: A Study in Government Patronage of the Arts, Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1976.
  • Taylor, David A., Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America, Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley & Sons, 2009.

Overview


Specific projects

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