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Unmasking the Writers of the W.P.A.

By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

The New York Times August 2, 2003

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 1 -- Writers are usually unabashed about
claiming authorship for their work. So it's curious that many of the
alumni of one of the most significant American literary projects of
the 20th century were ashamed of it: the Federal Writers' Project, a
program of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress
Administration.

Created in 1935, in the heart of the Great Depression, the
Writers' Project supported more than 6,600 writers, editors and
researchers during its four years of federal financing. When the
government funds expired, Congress let the program continue under
state sponsorship until 1943. Although grateful for even subsistence
wages in a time of economic despair, few participants deemed it a
badge of honor to earn $20 to $25 a week from the government.

But the Library of Congress takes a different view. With little
fanfare, it has been unpacking boxes of extraordinary Writers'
Project material over the last few years from warehouses and storage
facilities. After an arduous vetting process, much of it is now
available to the public.

What is becoming clear, says Prof. Jerrold Hirsch of Truman State
University, in Kirksville, Mo., is that the editors of the project
believed that they could build a national culture on diversity. "They
faced a great challenge coming out of the 1920's, where white
supremacists, via WASP primacy and the K.K.K. and anti-immigration
laws, held sway," Mr. Hirsch said. "In the Federal Writers' Project,
ethnic minorities were celebrated for being turpentine workers or
grape pickers or folk artists."

John Cheever was one of the program's unenthusiastic
participants. A child of proud Massachusetts Republicans who had
called the W.P.A. short for "We Poke Along," he was ashamed of
working as a "junior editor" at the program's Washington office. He
once described his duties as fixing "the sentences written by some
incredibly lazy bastards."

Nonetheless, Cheever's experiences at the Writers' Project
provided the material for many of the best scenes in his 1957 novel,
"The Wapshot Chronicle."

Cheever wasn't the only one who found inspiration at the Writers'
Project. Others included Conrad Aiken, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow,
Arna Bontemps, Malcolm Cowley, Edward Dahlberg, Ralph Ellison, Zora
Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Kenneth Patchen, Philip Rahv, Kenneth
Rexroth, Harold Rosenberg, Studs Terkel, Margaret Walker, Richard
Wright and Frank Yerby.

These federal employees produced what would become the renowned
American Guide Series, comprising volumes for each of the 48 states
that then existed, as well as Alaska. The Writers' Project also
turned out many other regional, city and cultural guides, like
Algren's "Galena, Illinois" and Wright's "Bibliography of Chicago
Negroes." All in all, it published more than 275 books, 700 pamphlets
and 340 "issuances" (articles, leaflets and radio scripts).

Eudora Welty even served as photographer for the Mississippi
guide. W. H. Auden called the whole project "one of the noblest and
most absurd undertakings ever attempted by a state."

Cataloging the output has been a long project. John Cole,
director of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, has
been working on it since 1978, when he first read Jerre Mangione's
seminal study "The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project,
1935-1943."

"The Library of Congress has its work cut out," Mr. Cole
explained in a telephone interview from his office on Capitol Hill.
"It's an amazing collection. The Federal Writers' Project helped us
rediscover our heritage in a more detailed and colorful way than it
had ever been described. I'm thinking here of both the state guides
and all of those other publications that they put out -- the
collection offers the best examples of local history and oddball
anecdotal stories ever amassed."

Nearly 3,000 of the oral history interviews are now available on
the Library of Congress's W.P.A. Life Histories Web site,
memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html, with more to come.

In the last few years, some good biographies of the most notable
alumni have been published. But no one has yet tackled a broad-based
study of the thousands of untested but talented young writers who
fanned out across the continent in search of a collective
self-portrait of America. Recently, though, a number of scholars and
researchers have begun to track the literary paper trail, unearthing
documents and writings that have been packed in boxes for decades.

Pam Bordelon, a writer in Pensacola, Fla., for example, has spent
the last 10 years editing interviews and compiling artifacts from the
project's Poets Recording Expeditions Into the Floridas. She has
traveled all over the state, searching for Writers' Project work done
by Hurston, who was hired to collect folklore during the 1930's.

"I was just blown away by the richness," Ms. Bordelon recalled.
"The voices in Florida alone are unbelievable."

David A. Taylor, a writer, and Andrea Kalin, a Washington
filmmaker, have begun work on "American Voices," a documentary
focusing on the Writers' Project in four states: New York, Florida,
Illinois and Nebraska. One discovery is unpublished correspondence
between Cheever and Ellison, who met at the project.

"The F.W.P. was much more than guidebooks and oral histories,"
Ms. Kalin explained. "It was where social and economic history met
the individual imagination in literature."

But it is difficult to trace authorship for the W.P.A. guides.
Mr. Bellow, for example, left mention of his Writers' Project work at
the Chicago office out of his entry in Who's Who in America. In
"Bellow," his biography of the author, James Atlas writes that Mr.
Bellow was humbled to be toiling alongside hard-drinking literary
heroes of the proletariat, like Algren and Jack Conroy, editor of the
leftist journal The Anvil. Mr. Bellow explains in the book, "I rather
looked up to them, and they looked down on me."

Mr. Bellow, whose first Writers' Project job was inventorying
Illinois periodicals at the Newberry Library, was later assigned to
write 20-page profiles of writers like John Dos Passos, Sherwood
Anderson and James T. Farrell. Mr. Atlas discovered the essays only a
few years ago when he was researching "Bellow."

"They're incredible essays, very advanced for somebody 21 or 22
years old," Mr. Atlas said. Mr. Bellow, he said, was ecstatic to
reread them recently, amazed that they still existed.

Wright and Walker were also first published while employed in the
Chicago office. Studs Terkel, another veteran, used the oral history
techniques he learned in the late 1930's as his model for books like
"The Good War" (1984) and "Working" (1974). And Albert Murray,
perhaps Ellison's closest friend as well as the author of classic
works like "South to a Very Old Place" (1971), maintains that without
the Writers' Project, Ellison would not have written "Invisible Man."

"It was because of the Writers' Project that I first got to read
pieces Ralph was writing on his own," Mr. Murray recalled in a
telephone interview from his home in Harlem. "It pulled him away from
music and focused him on writing. It put writers and artists in touch
as they had never been before. It was even more intense than the
Harlem Renaissance. Throughout `Invisible Man' there are sketches and
caricatures of people he met during the Federal Writers' Project."

Ellison himself is quoted in a Library of Congress document as
saying that the Writers' Project helped him better understand the
powerful connection between serious literature and folkways. "I tried
to use my ear for dialogue to give an impression of just how people
sounded," he notes in the document. "I developed a technique of
transcribing that captured the idiom rather than trying to convey the
dialect through misspellings."

But Ellison, like many of his peers, didn't like to talk much
about his days as a government employee. "He wanted to move away from
it," Mr. Murray said. "It was his training ground. But he had higher
concepts of art than the W.P.A. Guide Series."

Yet to many, the guide series are treasures. William Least Heat
Moon said he wouldn't have written "PrairyErth: A Deep Map" (1991)
without the Nebraska guide. When John Gunther hit the road for his
memoir "Inside U.S.A." (1947), his suitcase bulged with W.P.A.
Guides. So did John Steinbeck's when he set out to write "Travels
With Charley: In Search of America" (1962).

"The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the
United States ever got together, and nothing since has even
approached it," Steinbeck writes in the book. "It was compiled during
the Depression by the best writers in America, who were, if that is
possible, more depressed than any other group while maintaining their
inalienable instinct for eating."

Steinbeck points out that many of the printing plates for the
guides were smashed in the wake of a late-1930's witchhunt by
Representative Martin Dies Jr., Democrat of Texas, who insisted that
the W.P.A. was a Communist plot. But the Library of Congress has
hundreds of boxes of the guides' raw material: correspondence,
interview transcripts, slave narratives, research notes and
photographs. It is one of the most underused and untapped historical
collections in America.

With help from the library staff, Ms. Bordelon, for instance,
unearthed tape recordings or transcripts of recordings of these
Florida sources: Earltha White, who ran a soup kitchen in the slums
of Jacksonville; a Cuban cigar maker from Ybor City; white squatters
in the Everglades; Izzelly Haines, a midwife, who recalls delivering
her first baby; and Norberto Diaz, whose tale of the race-related
murder of a friend in Key West inspired Stetson Kennedy, a project
folklorist, to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.

"Whenever anyone asks me what it was like working with the Works
Progress Administration and recording Florida folk songs back in the
1930's for the Library of Congress," Mr. Kennedy once said in a radio
broadcast, "I tell them we were as excited as a bunch of kids on a
treasure hunt."

In "On Native Grounds" (1942), Alfred Kazin said the Writers'
Project, originally a "drive toward national inventory which began by
reporting the ravages of the Depression," ended with triumphant
"reporting on the national inheritance." He concluded that it changed
the course of American literature forever.

Douglas Brinkley is director of the Eisenhower Center and
professor of history at the University of New Orleans.

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