David Taylor's Soul of a People blog

Happy Diamond Jubilee, WPA Guides - Starting in Idaho

2012-01-09T21:31:00.000-05:00

This week 75 years ago, amid the Great Depression, the first in a series of quirky travel guides to America came out. Idaho: A Guide in Word and Picture was not the debut for the American Guides that federal officials had planned. Idaho had less than half a million residents and few people were planning to go there. But Vardis Fisher, a novelist and unemployed professor who had taken the reins of the tiny Idaho Writers’ Project, was a most unusual travel editor. He had big ambitions for his novels and their epic sweep of life in the Rockies, and this government-sponsored foray into nonfiction travel writing -- to keep his family alive during a terrible economy – was also ambitious.
    Fisher shows two elements of writing about a place. First, consider it the center of the universe. Even if nobody else considered Idaho the center of anything, Fisher wrote with conviction and humor of its odd shape and its mountains and conveyed the feeling that in Idaho, you found the universal human condition. Second, bring it alive through the stories of people who live and struggle there.
    In the same way, a young Richard Wright, working as a WPA writer in Chicago in January 1937 when the Idaho book came out, was discovering through his research in Illinois the idea that Black America – marginalized culturally and economically – was the heart and test of the American dream. Zora Neale Hurston held the same conviction about the folk culture of the Florida Gulf Coast, and was about to publish her novel putting a black woman literally at the center of the storm, with Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Janie’s struggle with men and the hurricane.
    The WPA guide to Idaho became a critical success. “An almost unalloyed triumph,” one reviewer called it. And as Fisher had hoped, it helped to create a national audience for his fiction. His next book was Children of God, the historical novel about Idaho pioneers that would be his bestselling book.
    As the 75th-anniversaries of the WPA guides unfold, writers intrigued by place and history are continuing their legacy. Use the new tools now available – for oral history, for online research that delves into local landmarks and documents (many found in the appendix to Soul of a People) – to push toward new discoveries at the center of the universe.

Bound for Tulsa

2012-01-03T07:50:00.001-05:00

The NY Times editorial about Oklahoma finally embracing its rambling son, Woody Guthrie, with a study center for his archives didn't mention his fellow exiled Oklahoman friend Jim Thompson, or Bound for Glory. But it did note the currency and poignancy of his songs like "Deportee" and that they could be heard recently on the lips of Occupy protesters. As the archive will reveal, there's more to Guthrie than folk songs, even though that's plenty.
Guthrie is featured in the Smithsonian documentary by Spark Media, Worlds of Sound: The Ballad of Folkways, which I happily worked on.

Give an Author this Holiday - Action Dolls?

2011-12-18T15:16:00.000-05:00

As featured this week on NPR's quiz show Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me, Uneek Dolls gives Etsy shoppers a chance to give their favorite author for the holidays. As a homemade doll.
The craft shop stocks nearly 40 writer dolls, including Mark Twain (source of Soul of a People's title), WPA enthusiast John Steinbeck, and Carson McCullers (good friend of Richard Wright, whose glowing review of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter appeared soon after his own novel Native Son had been a smash).
In the limerick clue, the show's own writers joked the dolls might not fulfill every child's dreams of dancing sugar plums: I'll be watching toy-making elves a bit tighter/ Plath and Kafka won't make Christmas brighter/ I'll have to recall this strange line of dolls/ What kid wants to play with a writer?

Griots for a Global Village

2011-12-10T10:17:00.000-05:00

This year marks the 100th birthday of Romare Bearden, and yesterday's article by Holland Cotter (with a slideshow) noted several ongoing celebrations of his work. Bringing together several themes in this blog, Cotter's article is titled "Griot for a Global Village." Bearden's visual storytelling adapts rhythms and motifs from traditional forms and makes them new, as did several other Harlem artists of the 1930s. Jacob Lawrence spoke of the interwoven fabric of visual and narrative art that emerged in that period, when he explored writing and Ralph Ellison studied sculpture.
Bearden's Foundation shows the broad sweep of that vision in his case, and how it continues to influence the way we see stories. There you find the statement about his influence by the griot of American 20th century theater, August Wilson: "What I saw was Black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness."

Blurb is a Verb: Your Book Trailer as Calling Card: A Success Story

2011-12-10T08:59:00.001-05:00

Guest post on Sarah Pinneo's helpful book publicity blog.

WPA Stories Caught the Quiet Before Pearl Harbor

2011-12-07T08:20:00.000-05:00

On the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, it's hard to imagine a time when that name didn't sound shadowed by a surprise strike. But just two years before the 1941 attack, family members spoke sunnily of their loved ones stationed in the faraway port in the South Pacific.
    The WPA life histories, lost in storehouses for decades, are now safe and searchable on the Library of Congress website.
   "By a strange coincidence, this boy, the pride of my life, is a soldier of Uncle Sam," Eliza Brady of Fernandina Florida says of her son Anthony. She tells WPA writer Rose Shepherd proudly that he "is Lieutenant-Commander of the aerial squadron in Pearl Harbor at Honolulu, Hawaii."
Ernest Gerber, a Swiss-American farmer in Marietta Georgia, recalled his stint in Pearl Harbor during an earlier world war. "
    "In September 1917 they sent me to the hospital at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii," he told A.G. Barie. "I was assigned to repair room and ward duties," but he spent his off-duty hours exploring the island with photography, often by boat. He told his interviewer of a rare surprise during his stay:
   "A man who was preparing material for a book embracing a story concerning the eruption of a volcano had come to the island for inspiration, and he asked me if I would be willing to take a party to Launa Los. I had been planning a trip there myself so we got a party together and sailed over. One of the men was a camera man for Fox Films." As they approached the volcano from the beach, "suddenly it seemed as if the earth itself was about to go to pieces. After a short sharp rumble a mass of smoke and fire shot up into the air hundreds of feet and a stream of lava rushed through an opening in the crater walls... This was the eruption of 1918, which furnished headlines for the newspapers, and stories for some of the magazines."

Touring the Occupied Lands

2011-11-10T21:02:00.001-05:00

Last week a visit to the Occupy DC movement in McPherson Square revealed an impressive level of awareness and a sense of settling in, as many braced for colder weather.
    Then I was in Providence, RI over the weekend for a conference of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), on the role of the arts and humanities in a democracy. The hotel was right across the street from the Occupy Providence forces, where tv crews did standup reports as commuters waited for their buses at the edge of the square. Impressive that some young people handling the protest's media tent could get college credit for their activism. Also impressive how seriously some in colleges and universities are about making education connect with the world in new ways, and with the arts to foster the empathy that many Occupiers yearn for. A good discussion after the screening of Soul of a People.
    Finally, passing back down from New England, I passed the half dozen tents that marked Occupy Poughkeepsie.
    In yesterday’s paper, Thomas Friedman drew the parallels and contrasts between the Occupiers and protesters in India: “Both countries are witnessing grass-roots movements against corruption and excess. The difference is that Indians are protesting what is illegal… And Americans are protesting what is legal – a system of Supreme Court-sanctioned bribery in the form of campaign donations that have enabled the financial-services industry to effectively buy the U.S. Congress… I think that repairing our respective dysfunctional democracies … is for our generation what the independence movement in India and the civil rights movement in America were for our parents’ generation.”

Voices of Frustration

2011-10-07T11:03:00.001-04:00

Well, things change in a week. The protest on Wall Street has gathered momentum in cities across the country. In TheRoot today, Chris Jenkins lets four skilled black professionals in DC speak for themselves on the frustrations of finding work now, in words that crystallize the protesters' concerns often better than the Occupiers themselves. Tyrone Jackson, an electrician, gives powerful expression to that experience and the lengths he's gone to -- hours back and forth between the city and Spotsylvania County, Virginia -- to find work.
"You could build a house with a foundation with the types of people I know who have skills out here and can't find jobs," he says.
Jenkins does right by Jackson and by the tradition of oral history.

What Happened to the Left?

2011-09-30T10:03:00.000-04:00

In Michael Kazin’s recent essay in the New York Times, he pointed out that measures that became institutionalized during the New Deal – Social Security, minimum wage, occupational health -- didn’t come simply from popular outrage at the Great Depression; the issues had percolated through decades of steady work and clarification.
    It's ironic, Kazin says, that in many ways the great American middle class of the 1950s and 60s was built with the help of these programs, such as Social Security and Truman’s G.I. Bill, that many Americans deemed radical when they were first proposed.
    Conservatives took the lesson. When they were out of power in the 1970s, they responded by organizing and developing their own voice and infrastructure, including much of talk radio now.
    Now the tide has changed again, Kazin argues, and progressives need to fortify institutions and create a coherent movement that articulates anew how they propose to improve Americans’ lives. They cannot assume their programs are transparent in their benefits to Americans; they must organize.
   Yesterday Kazin was on National Public Radio discussing his argument with listeners and The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel, who insisted that there are progressive movements that are demonstrating for changes in America. She blamed the media in part for not reporting on these movements, including the American Dream Movement.
    A final note: this week we say farewell to our friend Stetson Kennedy, who died last month. We say farewell with a celebration of his life tomorrow afternoon at his beloved home of many years, Beluthahatchee (the name means ‘place of peace’). If you’re near Jacksonville, turn out for what will be a remarkable party. Details at www.stetsonkennedy.com.

Amid Jobs Talk, Action for Creatives

2011-09-15T19:13:00.000-04:00

In a show of innovation and rare unity, nearly a dozen private foundations have partnered with the National Endowment for the Arts to fund local-level arts projects, recognizing the arts are essential for community growth, economic and otherwise.
Through a program called ArtPlace, a series of grants totaling $11.5 million (plus $12 million in corporate loans) will be distributed to 34 projects around the country.
"Too many people think of the arts as luxuries," the Ford Foundation's Luis Ubiñas told the New York Times. "The arts are inherently valuable, and they're also part of what's going to get us out of this economic problem we're in."

    Besides Ford, other foundations involved are the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Found-ation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the James Irvine Found-ation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Rasmuson Foundation, and the Robina Foundation.
    Federal agencies involved (not as funders) include no-nonsense departments of Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Transportation, Education, and Health and Human Services.
    Of course, the grants total equals just two percent of what Ford gave out in grants for 2009. But the program gives a sense of action. In the 1930s only a tiny fraction of WPA and other recovery funds went to the arts.
    The Times article also notes that a second group of grants starts today. Groups have a month to submit applications on the ArtPlace website.

Stetson Kennedy Delved into Florida Life

2011-08-29T14:56:00.003-04:00


Stetson Kennedy records his wife Edith in 1939.

Stetson Kennedy, who died on Saturday as Hurricane Irene stormed up the East Coast, had a love of justice and relished how people faced life and its challenges. He was a few weeks short of his 95^th birthday.

As a teenager in Jacksonville, Florida, Kennedy worked for his father’s furniture store, sometimes collecting payments and other times having to repossess items people could no longer afford as the Great Depression worsened. A stove might still be hot from the last meal cooked on it when he hauled it off, he recalled in interviews for Soul of a People.

Even then, Kennedy was struck by how Floridians spoke, black and white. He knew he was “hearing a subculture, or two subcultures really, that had significance and flavor.”

As a student during the Great Depression, he studied natural science before leaving college and becoming a student of human nature. He started gathering folklore and sayings in the varied communities of Key West, where he met his first wife. He found it remarkable how the island’s Cuban community, despite poverty, “were really enjoying life in a way that I’d never seen anybody enjoying life.” Even in hard times, people made time for song, dance, and food.

Kennedy joined the Florida Writers’ Project in December 1937 and worked on it as editor and folklorist for several years. He worked with Zora Neale Hurston on Florida folklore for the WPA Guide to Florida, and corresponded with Richard Wright about Wright’s essays on how to depict black culture. (He later visited with Wright in France when both were expatriates in the 1950s.) In 1939 Kennedy led one leg of a recording expedition that used portable sound equipment from the Library of Congress to record the stories and songs of a richly varied southern Florida. He interviewed his first wife Edith and her Cuban relatives in Ybor City and recorded the life stories of Bahamian midwives further south.

Having grown up privileged by a culture of segregation, Kennedy felt a responsibility to fight its injustices, and help expose those who exploited them in groups like the Ku Klux Klan. His undercover work led to him broadcast silly ritual codes in episodes of the Superman radio series in the late 1940s, and lay bare the brutal facts of their intimidation and terror. He ran for the U.S. Senate with a write-in candidacy in 1950, aided by a campaign song by Woody Guthrie. In his later years in Florida, he also championed environmental and labor causes. Kennedy’s life is the subject of a forthcoming film by Andrea Kalin. To learn more, visit the Stetson Kennedy website maintained by his grandson.

Writing Progress

2011-08-15T08:09:00.001-04:00

Coming on the heels of a writing workshop myself, I came across this site for building writers' skills and sense of work. Nicely designed too: http://tweedediting.com/wpa/

Feeling the Heat of Hell

2011-07-22T15:44:00.001-04:00

This current heat wave is shattering records that have stood since the 1930s Dust Bowl days. From Texas to Vermont, roads are shimmering molten and mirage-like as road crews gulp fluids to stay hydrated. The WPA writers captured the unworldly weather of that other time in their guides and books, including a photo essay about the devastating hurricane of 1938 that strafed New England.
In the Midwest, the newly republished WPA guide to Nebraska shows us searing heat in the state’s western sandhills, where mostly pioneer families made a hard living. Sandhills native Mari Sandoz was a mentor to workers on the Nebraska WPA’s staff in Lincoln, and in the Nebraska guidebook they quoted her hardbitten memoir of her father, Old Jules, and her folklore studies including “Sandhill Sundays.” In that a traveling preacher translated the emotional weirdness of the harsh weather from the wagon where he spoke and conjured hell as he invited families to the relief of a lake baptism:

You see them heat waves out there on the prairie? Them’s the fires of hell, licking round your feet, burning your feet, burning your faces red as raw meat, drying up your crops, drawing the water out of your wells! You see them thunderheads, shining like mansions in the sky but spurting fire and shaking the ground under your feet? God is mad, mad as hell!

The account goes on to subvert the stereotype of backward rural people by describing how Sandhill communities held cultural events with spell-downs, singing and debates on issues like Popular Elections of Our Presidents. People traveled up to 40 miles to enjoy late night dances, with snacks at midnight. A good time to go out when the day is hot as volcanic brimstone.

Watch Those Footsteps on the Capital Sidewalks

2011-07-14T16:37:00.001-04:00

On the streets of Washington, DC these days, it’s easy to walk right past addresses that are not famous but from which great things – and barely-employed writers – sprang.
    When John Cheever was a hungry young editor on the Federal Writers’ Project, he lodged at Mrs. Gray’s boardinghouse at 2308 Twentieth Street, NW, one block north of Columbia Rd. It wasn't far from his WPA office job.
    A friend and coworker soon introduced Cheever to the capital’s social life. At parties Cheever clinked glasses with conservatives and radicals, Cubans and Danes. Back at the boardinghouse where he took his meals with other government lodgers, one older woman routinely denigrated WPA employees and their boondoggling at the dinner table. Cheever would pretend not to hear when she asked him to pass the gravy. Cheever's memories of DC were of humiliation and conformity.
    Years earlier, Langston Hughes lived just a few blocks away on S Street, NW, in the orbit of Duke Ellington’s U Street neighborhood. From 1924-26 Hughes combined literary work with a job as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel (now the Marriott Wardman) at 2660 Woodley Rd. There he was “discovered” in 1926 by a white editor, Vachel Lindsay, who dubbed Hughes the “busboy poet” (see the Guide to Black Washington and Busboys and Poets).
    During the 1930s, Hughes made friends with young WPA writers Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison in Harlem. And he was good friends with Zora Neale Hurston, co-writing a play with her before they went separate ways.
    Hurston herself lived closer to Howard University during her time studying and working as a waitress in Washington years before.
    Who knows what yet-unknown creative hits the pavement every morning from another anonymous DC address, looking for work? Bringing reading and jobs together, the DC public library recently put together a good online toolbox for those jobseekers.

Happy Birthday, Margaret Walker

2011-07-07T20:21:00.000-04:00

This month there are several chances to see Soul of a People: Writing America's Story on the Smithsonian Channel. (Check here for times.)
    Today would be the 96th birthday of Margaret Walker, who was just out of college when she applied for a spot on the Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago. She had grown up in the oppressive segregation of Alabama, and turned to the books of her father, a minister, to escape. After college she almost married a young minister herself, but her mother urged her to make another path for her life. With few options for jobs in depressed Chicago, she lied about her age and got work as a WPA writer, meeting up very soon with other writers like Richard Wright and Nelson Algren. It was there, she later said, that she found her voice as a poet.
    "I changed from the very romantic and sentimental type of poetry to a very realistic and factual type of poetry," she said. "I was very conscious of making that change."
    She became willing to explore characters hit hard by their circumstances. She submitted her collection For My People to the Yale Younger Poets competition three years in a row. In 1942 it won. She went on to publish many more collections as well as a bestselling novel, Jubilee.

School Libraries Under Fire

2011-06-28T11:38:00.000-04:00

My early memories of reading take me back to the library at Washington Mill Elementary, where in third or fourth grade I spent hours poring over a series of biographies along with occasional scifi like A Wrinkle in Time. That was where I caught my appetite for life stories, one that nourishes me still – both intangibly and with food on the table.
    So it hurts to read that school districts across the country are eliminating libraries and librarian positions. In Oregon, all 48 librarians in the Salem-Keizer school district’s elementary and middle schools face layoffs in a budget that will be voted on this week.
    True, more classrooms are using laptops and iPads so students can do research without going to the library, but libraries are still where kids can learn skills they need to use those tools and analyze their searches and results, says Nancy Everhart, who leads a national association of school librarians, in the New York Times. In libraries they can find interests they might not otherwise see.

Three Writers Tackle History

2011-06-15T08:56:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday at the AIW Writers' Conference held at The Writer's Center, a trio of fine authors -- Barbara Esstman, C.M. Mayo and Natalie Wexler -- surrounded the challenges and opportunities of historical fiction from three sides. Here are C.M. Mayo's insights (plus a fine reading list for any writer) on her blog after the event.

Footsteps at Night: 1930s California

2011-06-10T09:34:00.000-04:00

Okay, forgive me first for pointing out Library Journal's glowing review of Soul of a People. They call it a “touching, straightforward, and well-paced look” at this slice of American history, “a welcome addition to literature and history collections.” My partners on the film and I couldn’t agree more.
Just in the last two months come two reprints of WPA guides, with insightful new introductions by David Kipen: the WPA Guide to Los Angeles, with an essay that points out the bubbling L.A. scene when the book was first written, with early film noir and Orson Welles, and late F. Scott Fitzgerald. Southern California was even more beautiful than now, and a magnet for fascinating people. “If only some benevolent patron had stepped in and commissioned a panorama of prewar Los Angeles,” Kipen writes. “In other words, if only there existed the book that you … now hold in your hand.” He is as lavish with San Francisco, where he lived for years.
This is how the stories and footsteps of the past stay with us. As I come from burying my father this week, this is on my mind: mixing stories with histories.

Amadou and Mariam: Storytellers for Change 3

2011-05-26T17:41:00.000-04:00

The other week I had the great opportunity to speak with the Malian duo Amadou and Mariam as they headed to China on their concert tour. The two just published a memoir, titled Away from the Light of Day, recorded a new CD, and are planning another exciting series of concerts.

Read what they have to say about their memoir, and changes in the lives of Malian musicians today, on Afropop Worldwide's site.

Music Against Malaria: Storytellers for Change 2

2011-04-25T09:27:00.000-04:00

For World Malaria Day, here’s my conversation with Yacine Djibo, country director for Malaria No More, from my recent trip to Senegal.

There as in Mali, the campaign to fight malaria highlights musicians committed to wiping the scourge from the countryside. In Dakar, Djibo described their intensive campaign to “surround malaria.” It involves Youssou NDour, catchy melodies, and an American Idol-style national contest. Watch the spot that appears every night on Senegalese TV.
Djibo says their campaign also offers a starting point for early diagnosis and better prevention with antimalarial drugs. Senegal’s cases of malaria have declined steeply in two years, according to this recent report by Roll Back Malaria.

Storytellers as Change Agents in West Africa?

2011-03-29T18:39:00.000-04:00

In Bamako on Sunday, I got to a wedding event (they spread through the weekend) where the families gathered and griots sang their praises. Griot is sometimes translated as "storyteller," and as a caste they have a fascinating and precarious place in Mali society and across West Africa: they traditionally depend on the patronage of wealthy families whose stories they sing at events, but they also sometimes speak truth to power.
   In this photo the female griot at right sings praises to the accompaniment of the djembe drummers in the foreground.
   Banning Eyre's book, In Griot Time, is a fun way into his story of learning Malian guitar from griots.
   In a growing global push against malaria, some health advocacy campaigns in Mali have enlisted griots. Recognizing how they have the ear of everyday people and thought leaders, the campaigns invite griots to integrate lyrics about how mosquito nets help protect children from getting malaria into their work. Some griots at the local-level have included that messaging at wedding gigs.

Now for Something Completely Different

2011-03-21T15:47:00.001-04:00

Now in West Africa for a month with an IRP reporting fellowship, and just getting my bearings in Mali's capital with a walk through the main market. Two quick and simple observations on the changes since Richard Wright's tour of these countries at independence just over a half century ago:
1) West African fashion is timeless but changes in communication and public relations move at warp speed (I exaggerate). Witness the teeming boys on every corner selling cellphone minutes, and a heightened perception by everyone here of how the world sees images from Africa. They know journalists usually go for the poverty-makes-sympathy shot.

Twice I framed a photo and got the stink eye. First an older man insisted I pay for the opportunity (he relented when I sounded incredulous about paying a building to take its picture). Then a teenage girl said my shot of people at a railroad crossing was "pas beau" -- not pretty. Both showed a consciousness of putting Mali's best foot forward and not getting exploited.
2) Impressive variety of food in the popular market. Where are they growing cool-weather items like lettuce? Lots of potatoes, garlic, tomatoes, mangoes, beets, peppers, fish of various sizes, and much more. And this is the hot season when wind kicks up dust and the temp spills over 100F.
The billboard for the cellphone and Internet service provider says 'Business is Everywhere.'

Reporting on Civil War in the Mediterranean

2011-03-07T17:41:00.001-05:00

An amazing exhibit at the International Center for Photography in New York captures the images of three photojournalists as they peered through their lenses at the Spanish Civil War. All three came from elsewhere in Europe: Robert Capa, born in Hungary; Gerda Taro from Germany; and David Seymour (aka Chim) from Poland.
    The Spanish Civil War itself came from elsewhere in some ways. Many across Europe saw it as a foretaste of the ideological battle looming for the rest of Europe, between Fascism and its opponents. Hitler and Mussolini backed Francisco Franco’s army. The Soviet Union and communists elsewhere supported the Republican forces. For many progressive Americans, volunteering in the “Lincoln brigade” in Spain to support the Republic was a test of ideals.
    The Mexican Suitcase exhibit is dramatic for its story of how the photographers came together in love and friendship in a war zone, as well as how their story in images became a time capsule, lost for decades before emerging from a single valise.
    It’s especially resonant now as another wave of violent change shakes Libya and the Mediterranean.
    For many WPA writers in the U.S., the Spanish Civil War posed a crisis of conscience: Would they go abroad and put their lives on the line for fellow travelers for the cause of a more egalitarian world? Richard Wright wrote his friend Nelson Algren back in Chicago, asking that very question.
    In California, WPA writer Eluard Luchell McDaniel was one who responded. He had run away from Mississippi at age 10 and worked his way across America, growing up through odd jobs along the way, and writing. After gaining notice when his fiction appeared in Story magazine in 1935, he went to fight with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade before returning to San Francisco.
Just as it did when Gerda Taro lost her life covering the war in Spain, bearing witness can still mean risking everything. Recently photojournalist and former IRP fellow Chris Hondros died while covering the civil war in Libya. Read about him and the continuing perils of war reporting here.

Patti Smith and Mari Sandoz, Kindred Spirits

2011-01-18T17:26:00.002-05:00

In her wonderful memoir Just Kids, Patti Smith honors inspiration she gained from another writer during her formative time living in the Chelsea Hotel:

I thought of something I learned from reading Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas by Mari Sandoz. Crazy Horse believes that he will be victorious in battle, but if he stops to take spoils from the battlefield, he will be defeated. He tattoos lightning bolts on the ears of his horses so the sight of them will remind him of this as he rides. I tried to apply this lesson to the things at hand, careful not to take spoils that were not rightfully mine. I decided I wanted a similar tattoo.

Such an insight about Crazy Horse is just the thing that attracted readers to Sandoz, a daughter of Swiss immigrants in the sandhills of western Nebraska. Like Smith herself, Sandoz overcame huge obstacles to become a writer. Her own father once told her, "You know I consider writers and artists the maggots of society."
    Sandoz grew up on a farm near the Sioux reservation at Pine Ridge, and they were part of her childhood. "I remember the stern faces of the Sioux when in the swift heat of temper my father whipped us," she recalled later. "These Indians still consider the whites a brutal people who treat their children like enemies …"
    One day, walking home with a bundle of wood, she came upon an old Sioux man and stopped to watch as he danced alone. The old warrior called her "granddaughter" and told her his story.
    Later as a colleague and friend of WPA folklore director Ben Botkin, Sandoz blazed new trails in her interviews for her biography of Crazy Horse. She was considered for the job of state director of the WPA Writers’ Project in Nebraska.
    Rudolph Umland, a young WPA editor in Lincoln, saw Sandoz as a mentor and respected the toughness she showed from her youth on the farm. Years later he still remembered her stories of growing up poor, wearing dresses made from flour sacks and old men’s shoes laced with twine.
    "She knew what it was like to be made fun of," Umland wrote. "No woman bent on being a literary person ever had the cards stacked against her more ... She once showed me a knot on her hand that came from a bone broken during one of [her father's] beatings."
    In the 1930s, her book about her father, Old Jules, won the prestigious Atlantic Press nonfiction prize. Sandoz became a leading Nebraska author, and hosted social gatherings of younger writers in her Lincoln apartment. The topics ranged from writing dialogue to demonstrations of Polish dances she had learned as a girl.
    Sandoz belonged to no group or movement, but savored these discussions with younger writers.
    "There were an awful lot of young creative people around," she said of 1930s Lincoln in a 1961 interview. "We were angry over the suppression of ideas in America."
    By the 1960s, Sandoz was living in Greenwich Village, not far from where Patti Smith later took up residence in the Chelsea. Sandoz's spirit was honored by Umland and his colleagues in the Nebraska WPA guide, which ranked her Old Jules among the most important pieces of prose from Nebraska since Willa Cather’s novels. "Mari Sandoz treats epic material boldly," says the guide, "with scrupulous honesty."

WPA Guide Appreciators week continues

2011-01-11T08:56:00.002-05:00

While we're on the topic of people who value the WPA guides, here's a post by El Prez about his battered copy of the WPA Almanac for New Yorkers, 1938. Bought from a sidewalk vendor years ago, it includes an inscription from M.W. Wellman, one of the WPA writers who worked on it, inscribed with holiday wishes to "one of his debtors." Wellman even points the reader to pages with good and bad jokes. Possibly the same M.W. Wellman who wrote several issues of Strange Adventures for DC Comics in 1951?
El Prez noticed that 1938 and 2011 align not just in their parallel hard times, but in the dates and days of the week. He found the New York Times beat him to the idea of providing a scan of the 1938 almanac for people in 2011 to use. Thanks, Gray Lady!

Oklahoma lawyer and the WPA guide

2011-01-08T17:00:00.001-05:00

I'm curious about this blog, Oklahoma DUI Lawyer, and why a recent post features a 1986 reprint of the WPA guide to Oklahoma. Straightforward description of the book: just the facts, ma'am. But still intriguing ...

De Niro Art Goes Back to the WPA

2011-01-03T14:41:00.000-05:00

Actor Robert De Niro's parents were both artists with the WPA in New York in the 1930s when the arts program helped many get through the Depression. Other WPA artists then included Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Robert De Niro Sr.'s art works made news recently when the actor took control as manager of his father's art legacy. His mother, Virginia Admiral, was a poet as well as a painter. Both parents belonged to the Greenwich Village art community. This article about New York abstract expressionism recounts the roots of that group in the Federal Art Project; the 2006 De Kooning biography gives a good feel for it.

New Deal Arts After the Election

2010-12-21T18:14:00.001-05:00

Last month I joined a group at the FDR Memorial Library in Hyde Park, NY, which hosted a discussion of the New Deal’s Enduring Legacy, focused on the arts programs. In the wake of the mid-term election, it was a chance to assess how Americans dealt with unemployment crises and culture. The Poughkeepsie Journal covered it in this article.
People noted today's parallels with 1938, another mid-term election when Republicans reclaimed seats in Congress, that time a backlash against the New Deal. In the debate leading up to those elections, the WPA projects were a lightning rod.
In his overview, Nick Taylor, author of American-Made, observed that government support for the arts is always a tough sell to the American public. He noted that federal contracts officers, too, weren’t used to dealing with artists. For instance, why couldn’t WPA artists all use the same type of paint, so they could order by the barrel? Peggy Bulger from the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center added to the picture of how music and folklore got preserved at a critical juncture.

    I made several points about the Writers’ Project and how it helped innovate in the wake of the newspaper closures of the 1930s. College kids with short resumés like Jim Thompson, Margaret Walker and Ralph Ellison got on their feet with WPA writing jobs, plus a firsthand sense of what writers contributed to society. The older jobless got a life raft, short term. My main point, though, was that the arts programs left a long-tailed creative connection to American life for decades afterward. FDR said at the time, "One hundred years from now, my administration will be known for its art, not its relief.”
    Susan Quinn, author of Furious Improvisation, about the WPA Theater Project, told the story of Orson Welles’ time with the WPA and how the play The Cradle Will Rock, staged in Manhattan amid a wave of strikes, brought drama down Broadway as cast, crew and audience all paraded from the theater where they were shut out to another space. The show went on. (See the 1999 film, Cradle Will Rock.)
    Cynthia Koch, director of the FDR Library, discussed the WPA arts legacy in the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, including NEA battles of the 1980s and the resurgent culture wars now. Good points from the live audience and from others, emailed in. C-SPAN3 will air the Arts & History event December 26 and again January 1 and 2.
    And still we have an unemployment rate hovering above 9%.

Powerful Woman from East Side: Anzia Yezierska

2010-12-06T19:16:00.002-05:00

Anzia Yezierska paved the way for great storytellers like Grace Paley, who read Yezierska’s stories and novels of Jewish immigrant life as a young woman. Yezierska probed the tensions within families and the dilemmas facing women before anyone else. She resisted her mother’s traditional role and her father’s paternalism, and she struggled for a way to carve out her own identity.
    "She was in the Lower East Side, which in a sense was much more densely immigrant than East Bronx," where Paley grew up, Paley said in a 2004 interview. Speaking of Yezierska’s stories, she said: "I loved them. I really read her later, when I began to read stories again and get away from 'literature.' When I got away from 'literature' I became close to the literature that I had to do."
    Last week a blog post noted how Yezierska’s book Hungry Hearts became a Hollywood movie in 1922 produced by the Goldwyn Company. Some scenes were filmed in the markets of the Lower East Side. It premiered in theaters on December 3, 1922.
    Yezierska rode a rollercoaster, going from sweatshops on the Lower East Side to Los Angeles, where she received $200 per week as a screenwriter. "Yezierska was overwhelmed by her portrayal in the popular press as a 'sweatshop Cinderella,'" says the blog. She left Hollywood after only a few months.
    She later chronicled the Great Depression in the 1930s and her time as a WPA writer with a clear eye for the pain experienced by the downwardly mobile. She expressed the acute shame of joblessness in a memoir, Red Ribbon on a White Horse:

Friends retreated before my failing fortunes just as I had once run away from my own poor people. Occasionally I ran into some of the celebrities with whom I used to dine at the Algonquin. At first I was naïve enough to greet them with the warmth I felt at the sight of a familiar face. Only after I saw their embarrassment did I learn to avoid noticing them at all.

Like so many others, Yezierska experienced the shame as if it were her fault. Later she embraced the idea that this anti-Cinderella story – her return to poverty – was a more universal story that she should tell. (This video clip introduces her in Soul of a People.)
Red Ribbon on a White Horse became a bestseller in 1950. To help it sell, W.H. Auden, who was already a famous poet, wrote a preface. Looking back, he called the Writers' Project "the most noble and absurd undertaking ever attempted by any state. No other [government] has ever cared whether its artists as a group lived or died."

Richard Wright, 50 Years On

2010-11-28T12:27:00.001-05:00

Fifty years ago today, Richard Wright died in Paris, just over 50 years old. From a poor sharecropping family in Mississippi, he grew up in a single-parent household and made his way in Chicago toward stability and into his life as an author. He became the poet, as Isabel Wilkerson writes in The Warmth of Other Suns, of the Great Migration (the title of her book comes from Wright).

What I found in exploring Wright’s letters and work in research for Soul of a People was, first, how much the Writers’ Project connected young writers and helped shape Wright’s own path. He charted his move from Chicago to New York in 1937 as a way to get to the heart of American publishing, and his instrument for that was the Project. “When I go tonight, I will have forty dollars in my pocket,” he told his friend Margaret Walker as they rode the El his last night in Chicago. Wright hoped he could swing a transfer to the Writers’ Project office in Manhattan. He confided, “I hope I’m not making a mistake, going this way.”

Even after he burst on the New York literary scene with Uncle Tom’s Children and later with the bestseller Native Son (which benefitted from Walker’s research in Chicago), Wright remembered friends from his WPA days. He kept up a startling and often funny dialogue with Nelson Algren for years (see Algren's postcard above, and this piece in the American Scholar), and mentored younger writers. Wright was a complex and charged personality, and no loyalty was easy. Yet in a Town Hall radio debate about the New Deal projects in April 1939, Wright spoke up for the increasingly unpopular arts programs. As a young black writer, he said, the WPA’s cultural programs served “to keep alive in the hearts of youth the dream of a free and equal mankind, a dream which, if allowed to die, will open the gates to a ruthless and brutal tide of fascism…”
Today, in honor of Wright, the teachers’ seminar at the University of Kansas known as The Wright Connection, asks people to share impressions about Wright as they have come to know him, through reading, teaching, and otherwise. Says director Maryemma Graham, “We want to use the 50th anniversary to promote further readings and rereadings, to locate new avenues to and from Wright for our students, and engage Wright through contemporary forms of scholarly inquiry.” She points to their website for postings, where you’ll find her own reflections along with those of Wright's daughter Julia and others.

Big Night for Soul of a People

2010-11-24T10:03:00.002-05:00

Soul of a People: Writing America's Story took home multiple awards from the Peer Awards ceremony recently. The awards, given by the Washington, DC chapter of the Television, Internet & Video Association (TIVA), represent recognition of filmmakers by their colleagues in filmmaking. Andrea Kalin and her production team at Spark Media took awards in nine categories, and Soul of a People won four: best scriptwriting (nonfiction, >30 minutes), best original composition (for Joseph Vitarelli), a silver for sound mixing, and the night's top honor, the Best of DC Award.
We were happy to share the evening with representatives from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provided major funding for the film, and our partners at the Library of Congress.
I'm thrilled to be part of that winning team and proud of what we produced in a documentary about everyday people at a crucial point in American history. As cultural historian Maryemma Graham, one of our commentators, says in the film, the WPA writers' experience "forces us not to divide people, books, good literature from one another. It makes America recognize where those values come from, and how they get re-affirmed through literature."

Un-American, the Label

2010-10-21T22:10:00.000-04:00

Here we mark the release of a new DVD box set of Humphrey Bogart films, including his memorable angry man in Black Legion (watch a trailer here), about a clandestine fascist KKK-like group during the Depression. Fascist groups in America? That’s un-American.
    But what is un-American anyway? Joseph McCarthy kicked up dust with the term with his anti-Communist hunt in the 1950s, but the concept goes back much further. (Are Americans unique in our outraged determination to define what we aren’t? Do you hear about un-French activities, or un-Chinese?) Other countries might use the term ‘traitorous,’ but that’s not quite the same thing.
    The OED finds the first use of un-American in 1818, barely a generation after the United States became a nation. Later Theodore Roosevelt tried to define the term as simple extremism. He wrote, “Everything is un-American that tends either to government by a plutocracy or government by a mob.”
    Maybe that’s what Rand Paul meant in May when he called the Obama administration’s efforts to make BP responsible for the Gulf clean-up un-American. Or maybe it was just a handy word for lighting a fire.

    The first Congressional attempt to uproot un-American-ness began in 1938 as war clouds gathered overseas. Texas congressman Martin Dies chaired the House Committee on Un-American Activities, known popularly as HUAC, with considerable public support. In Gallup polls at the time, Americans placed Dies above FDR on a list of patriots. Dies had his own criteria for un-American, but they were elusive.
    Martin Dies said he found potentially un-American content about labor history in the WPA guides, and about race in an essay by Richard Wright on “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” that appeared in a 1937 anthology by WPA writers called American Stuff. (American Stuff also included songs from inmates in Southern prisons gathered by John Lomax, Jim Thompson’s short story about an oil-worker who runs amok on a rampage of rape and murder, and a Kenneth Rexroth poem.)
    As historian Douglas Brinkley said about Dies in an interview for Soul of a People, “When he’s talking about un-American, it’s people that have funny last names.”
    That echoes Frank Taylor, Bogart’s embittered auto worker in Black Legion: “No matter what it is or who commenced it, I’m against it,” Frank growls. “Especially if they’re after my job and have an unpronounceable last name.” Bogart himself held more progressive views.
    Un-American has often been used to refer to deeply ingrained aspects of American life that the speaker would like to amputate: Racism, greed and class strife have been as likely to get labeled un-American as Communism, hedonism and any other -ism. In this sense, the un-American label is like a tourniquet someone uses to isolate a limb that they think is causing trauma to the body politic. What's really causing the trauma is another story.
    When the cry of "Un-American!" makes a resurgence - often with an election coming - it's worth figuring out what it says about the person who wields it before looking at who they’re attacking.

Documenting Kansas, a Work in Progress

2010-10-14T15:50:00.000-04:00

This online exhibit by Dr. Lorraine Madway at Wichita State University shows Kansas during the Depression, the only decade in Kansas history when the state population declined. The photos by FSA photographers show the scorched earth of the Dust Bowl and government efforts at soil reclamation, as well as tight-rope performers that Russell Lee noticed at the 4-H club fair in Cimarron.

A Man Named L'Amour

2010-09-29T17:27:00.001-04:00

Louis L'Amour, one of the bestselling writers of Westerns in history, started out writing for the WPA guide to Oklahoma under the direction of noir novelist Jim Thompson. Born Louis LaMoore in North Dakota, he regaled other WPA staff with tales from travels to Africa and Asia. He helped organize a Southwest Writers’ Conference in May 1937 and often visited the Thompsons’ house for dinner. Over time, Thompson tired of LaMoore’s tall tales. In L'Amour's memoir An Education of a Wandering Man, he wrote,

At the time I settled down in Oklahoma to become a writer or else, the short story was the thing. There were many magazines publishing short stories... However, they paid very little, and the number of people who could write quality stories... far exceeded the market... I had to make a living from my writing, and that meant work and lots of it.

Somehow he left out mention of his time working on the WPA. But L'Amour did note that the Writers' Project "sent out people to interview old-timers and gather what material they could... The interviews vary in quality, but some are excellent and most contain information important to history."
Tomorrow night in L'Amour's beloved West, the Colorado Springs Arts Center will show Soul of a People: Writing America's Story.

Confucius Visits D.C. for his Birthday

2010-09-23T10:40:00.000-04:00

Maybe you don’t expect to see Confucius commemorated on his birthday in a U.S. public library, but on September 25 that’s what you will find in the main DC public library downtown. The Chinese philosopher and educator gets his 2,561st birthday blowout not with a cake but with a musical celebration of his influential ideas and his Analects.
It’s not such a surprising fit, after all, with the institution of American public libraries and their democratic principle of self-education with a library card.
And yes, the great man appears in the WPA guides too. The 1939 WPA Guide to California visits the Tin How Temple in San Francisco, on Waverly Place, the “oldest Chinese joss house in San Francisco,” and for that matter, the oldest Chinese temple in the United States. In 1939 you could go up to the fourth floor and ring for entry, and inside you'd find the centuries-old main altar, covered with gold leaf and carvings depicting scenes from the life of Confucius.

Jobs Stimulus Stutters and Echoes

2010-09-16T19:27:00.002-04:00

The Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial is one of many voices saying that President Obama's stimulus has been less than stimulating for new jobs, and that his proposed second round is a recognition of that. It's worth remembering that FDR's New Deal didn't come in one straightforward push either: there was a first phase with financial reform (heard about that) and the National Recovery Administration. When that wasn't enough to kickstart the economy, FDR created larger programs like the WPA, unprecedented in scale and impact.
Some conservative bloggers have said that by 1939, when many of the New Deal programs ended, unemployment hovered around 19%. They imply that the programs were failures. They don't say that when the New Deal began, unemployment was nearly twice that level, and had dropped to 14.3% in 1937 before an uptick as the programs ended.
Our recession today isn't on the same scale as the Great Depression. Don't let a false comparison suggest that the New Deal didn't get people back to work.

Documenting the Lone Star State

2010-09-08T18:15:00.001-04:00

The Texas WPA writers came up against some of the most virulent anti-WPA sentiment anywhere, and it was stoked by a Texas congressman Martin Dies from Beaumont. That didn't stop them from producing a clear-eyed view of the state, including hot-button topics like labor history and poverty, such as this recap of the violence between unions and union busters:

Longshoremen on Houston's cotton docks

In the early 1930s the longshoremen at Houston and in the chief shipping centers of southeast Texas, although organized along craft lines, developed a strong militant unit… In 1934 striking longshoremen, strikebreaker guards, and non-union workers clashed frequently and violently for four months. On one occasion three men were killed. The oil workers are the largest group of the Texas membership of the CIO…

And this look at culture, poverty and housing problems in cities like San Antonio:

In west San Antonio are odd shops, women wrapped in black rebozos huddling over baskets of freshly made tortillas, and brilliant paper flowers… The poorer section covers about 25 blocks… The very poor live in housing conditions devoid of comfort… In 1936 a slum clearance program was begun by the city… more than 2,300 houses were razed or closed… The necessities of the very poor have been exploited by various interests… In 1934, the average piece work wage for a 54-hour week was $1.56.

These excerpts appear in honor of their work on the guidebook, published 70 years ago yesterday (Sept. 7, 1940). Don't mess with Texas.

Coming to America Stories - Free for a few days

2010-09-02T16:29:00.000-04:00

There's nothing like hearing it from the horse's mouth. Listen to Lawrence Meinwald relive the emotional charge he felt seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time in 1920, or hear Millvina Dean, last living survivor of the Titanic.
For a few days -- until Monday, September 6, reports the Times -- you can listen for free to stories from oral histories recorded with people who immigrated to the U.S. through Ellis Island. Recorded by the National Park Service, the recordings have up to now been accessible only if you went to the Ellis Island park.

When Work Relief was Murder

2010-08-31T18:22:00.000-04:00

Work relief on a scale as massive as the WPA struck Americans of the 1930s with numbed amazement – it was radically bigger than any such effort up to then. It immediately triggered appalled reactions in essays, radio, fiction and pop music. Tunesmiths already riffed on the plight of unemployment, but with the WPA came songs like “Pink-Slip Blues” (the original ‘pink slips’ were the bureaucratic notices that told workers their time on WPA relief was up) and “WPA Blues.”
    Louis Armstrong teamed up with the Mills Brothers to record “W.P.A.” with the classic lines, “Sleep while you work while you rest while you play/Lean on your shovel to pass the time away.../The WPA.”
    In fiction, what better way to sell a novel than by combining a timely topic with a whodunit? That at least was the idea of the 1937 novel by Alexander Williams titled Murder in the WPA. In that, a bewildered agent is told to find out who killed a WPA supervisor in New Jersey. As the plot unfolds, it reveals many suspects: disgruntled employees (some who got the pink slip), political rivals, and more.
    Political cartoons skewered the WPA at every turn. Studs Terkel recalls in Soul of a People how Chicago Tribune cartoons on the front page mocked WPA workers as boondogglers, a term for thumb-twiddling taken from old westerns. If the humiliation and stress of being out of work wasn’t enough for you, just pick up the newspaper.

Museum Presents Life when the Depression Hit the Pacific Northwest

2010-08-23T16:19:00.000-04:00

Along the Oregon coast, the landscape and a new exhibit in Cannon Beach point to the ways people made it through a previous hard time. Read the story in the local paper or at the museum's website.
Russell Lee's FSA photo shows fishing boats in Astoria, OR.

Adventures in Animating Real Stories

2010-08-13T08:40:00.000-04:00

The New York Times recently reported that StoryCorps will release animated short films based on interviews that ordinary people have recorded in the nearly seven years of StoryCorps' existence. (Their approach was inspired by the WPA Writers' Project, creator Dave Isay told me for Smithsonian way back when.) This opens a door for taking the stories of real people into an imaginative new dimension. It requires relatively little money and an eye for a good, revealing story. They have a first sample online here.
It helps if you have broadcast-quality voices from the original storyteller, as in the StoryCorps case, but the WPA Life Histories online hold gems that would work well as animated shorts too.
Try this: Find 2 or 3 vivid episodes in a life history (maybe in your home state, or not) and imagine a two-minute video for one of them.

Decoding Mad Men with Cheever

2010-07-26T17:06:00.003-04:00

With Ossining, New York as the locale of Don Draper's broken home in the TV series Mad Men, notes the New York Times, "If 'Mad Men' came with a decoder ring it would surely spell out: Read John Cheever."

    Cheever delved beyond the idylls of suburbia to find the mixed blessings beneath the surface in his prize-winning stories. Before he became the Ovid of Ossining, he learned the layers of American life and complexity writing about Manhattanites, including his stint on the New York Writers' Project, finishing up the WPA guide to the city.
    “One of Cheever’s most prominent themes is that things are not what they seem,” notes Blake Bailey, Cheever's biographer. In that, Cheever has much in common with fellow WPA alumni Richard Wright and noir novelist Jim Thompson (whose The Killer Inside Me was remade as a film released this year). Thompson's biographer Robert Polito says in Soul of a People, "Thompson said that Karl Marx gave him a language to understand his life, and he later put that in literary terms. He said that there were 32 ways of telling a story but really only one plot: that things are not what they seem."
Wright similarly wrote of African American life in 12 Million Black Voices, penned while he was on the New York writers' project with Cheever: "Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of the farms or upon the hard pavement of the city streets, you usually take us for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem…"
    Maybe this is only natural. The Great Depression heightened writers' awareness of the contradictions in American life. As literary historian Maryemma Graham notes in the current issue of Poets & Writers, WPA writers discovered "the possibility that there was another story of America that had remained untold..."

Birth of the Reality Show

2010-07-09T15:39:00.001-04:00

You could call the Federal Writers’ Project the first reality show, with contestants thrown together from all walks of life vying for a chance to get a job doing real writing, not just emergency relief. Their challenge, more chaotic and impossible than a gourmet snack-food quickfire test on Top Chef: ‘Keep it real’ and paint America's portrait in guidebooks and the words of people floundering in hard times.

    Or you might argue the roots of the genre lie somewhere else in that period. During the Depression many writers engaged their readers in a kind of Survivor contest, challenging the reader directly to get through new and harrowing encounters. Ernest Hemingway practiced a brutal version of this in a New Masses article about the Florida hurricane of 1935, where he frog-marched his reader through a ruined landscape where hundreds of World War I veterans died working on a battered WPA highway in the Florida Keys. An outraged Hemingway spares you nothing and forces you to handle the bodies:
    “Hey, there’s another one,” Papa says. “Turn him over. Face tumefied beyond recognition…” After pushing you to turn grey and vomit, Hemingway by the end of the article is ready to kill you off the way the veterans died: “a high wall of water rolls you over and over… You’re dead now, brother.”
    That would teach readers of New Masses a lesson! “But presumably if you had survived,” William Stott writes in Documentary Expression and Thirties America, “this imagined death, as Hemingway did, you would try to do what he was trying to do with his article: bring to justice those 'who left you there in the hurricane months on the Keys.'”
    The WPA writers didn’t take it quite that far, but the life history interviews take you deep into their narrators’ experiences. In some cases, it was up to you to survive, for example, the vagaries of a corrupt local mafia, like one Fort Worth family in Soul of a People.

Seeing Where WPA Materials Lead Library Patrons

2010-07-01T17:51:00.000-04:00

There's a round-up of experiences and lessons from the recent series of events in 29 libraries across the country here, based on presentations at the ALA annual conference in Washington last week. Good stuff! And a cool slideshow montage of those libraries' programs too.
Also, the dvd of Soul of a People: Writing America's Story is now available to buy. It includes bonus scenes from an interview with Studs Terkel, among others.

Works in Philadelphia

2010-06-21T11:08:00.000-04:00

I look forward to the free event at the Free Library in Philly next week, June 29 at 7:30 pm. Philadelphia Speaks reminded me of the WPA art in that city. And here's a City Paper piece on Philadelphian Ennis Carter's look at the bold WPA posters. See you there.

WPA Guides and Cities of the Imagination - Part 2

2010-06-04T16:13:00.004-04:00

Across the country, WPA guides were coming out to a publicity blitz. The guide to California was considered strong enough to become a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. A young artist and poet emigré from Chicago, Kenneth Rexroth, worked an editor for the California guide in its San Francisco office, and typed up hiking routes for the guide on the Sierras. (More on this in the book.)

    Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Martin Dies, a Texas congressman, led the first House Un-American Activities Committee investigation of the WPA and branded several WPA guides as enemy propaganda for what he considered leftist commentary on labor and race issues. The political tide was turning against the WPA as the federal budget tightened for war. In time, FDR repositioned the WPA guides as patriotic; by 1942 when troops were shipping out for Europe and the Pacific, each G.I. received a copy of the WPA guide to his home state to remind him of the home he was fighting for.
    By that point, Vincent McHugh, who had led the WPA guide work in New York, shipped out to the Pacific with the merchant marines.
    The WPA experience created a bond among its survivors in later years, although often tinged with bitterness. By the 1960s McHugh was on the West Coast, scraping out a living as a freelancer and occasional teacher. He told fellow WPA survivor Jerre Mangione, “The whole WPA experience seems to have gone uselessly down the drain.”
    Yet its creative imprint on McHugh’s work received a revival. His novel inspired by the WPA experience, I Am Thinking of My Darling, got its Hollywood moment in 1968 when a veteran of Marx Brothers films adapted it as What’s So Bad About Feeling Good? The film opens with an aerial over lower Manhattan, descending for closer views of jackhammer operators, traffic, shoppers and businessmen in bars, to the harbor and a freighter from Greece. Instead of the novel’s city planner, George Peppard plays an ad executive-turned-beatnik involved with Mary Tyler Moore, a disenchanted radical.
    Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti came to know McHugh in San Francisco, when McHugh would gather with others at Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore along with the Beats’ mentor... Kenneth Rexroth.
    McHugh, working with Ferlinghetti and a young Chinese poet named C.H. Kwock, set out to translate classical Chinese poems in a series of chapbooks. They enlisted a former spy and nightclub singer who had done translations for the American consulate in Hong Kong. McHugh and Kwock would visit Mr. Yao, the singer-translator, in a decrepit boardinghouse on the city’s former Barbary Coast, yelling up from an alley to get entry. Yao helped them produce an anthology that a Berkeley professor said had “an architectural beauty that no other translations of Chinese poetry ever did have.”
    City Lights distributed the first in the series, Why I Live on the Mountain. In that 1958 collection (reprinted in 1980), McHugh brought one poem from the T’ang dynasty into English with the title, “To Someone Far Away.” The poet recalls a lover he addresses as “pretty darling” and whose fragrance still lingers in his bed. “Pretty darling,” he ends wistfully, “never came back.”
    It’s as if McHugh were uniting his Pacific-facing life with the Manhattan he had immortalized in the WPA guide and in his own Darling, a kiss blown to his first-loved city from across the continent, from his last.

WPA Guides and Cities of the Imagination - Part 1

2010-05-28T10:10:00.001-04:00

The WPA guides track fine-grained details of 1930s America, from the call signals of long lost radio stations to stories of tenement families. But what does that have to do with creativity? The main purpose of WPA work was a paycheck for the unemployed, after all. Yet Margaret Walker later wrote that the WPA fostered "what nobody believed was possible at that time -- a renaissance of the arts and American culture, and some of the most valued friendships in the literary history of the period."
    For years after Congress shut down the WPA writers’ budget in 1939, the only signs of any creative legacy rested on a few bestsellers, mainly Richard Wright’s Native Son, Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning, and a mostly-forgotten novel by Vincent McHugh, I Am Thinking of My Darling, which made the New York Times bestseller list and was optioned by RKO with Cary Grant. (You could argue for Zora Neale Hurston’s books Moses, Man of the Mountain and Dust Tracks on a Road, but neither got big sales, and Walker’s For My People -- poetry a bestseller?)
    Henry Alsberg, the national director of the Writers’ Project, did want to do more than put people to work. He wanted to gather up mid-century America and its cultures in mini encyclopedias for each state before it was all swept away. And he wanted people working on those guides to be creatively enriched. Eventually, you could say, the results bear him out: Looking down the roster of his staff in New York City alone is like reading a fortune cookie for American letters in the 20^th century: John Cheever, Wright, and Ralph Ellison (his first writing job), along with poet May Swenson. Nationally the project rolls included Hurston, Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, Margaret Walker, Kenneth Rexroth, Meridel LeSueur, pulp writer Jim Thompson, western novelist Louis L’Amour, Arna Bontemps, Harry Partch, choreographer Katherine Dunham, and poet and painter Weldon Kees. Maybe more important are writers who gave voice to their regions, including Juanita Brooks and Vardis Fisher in the West, and Lorin Brown in the Southwest.
    But could you say in the mid-1940s that the Writers’ Project opened up the imaginations of even its successful writers? Here we look at the answer in terms of Vincent McHugh. He grew up in blue-collar Rhode Island in the 1920s, moved to New York, and wrote several novels and pieces for The New Yorker. Then in late 1936 the WPA called. The WPA guide to New York City had stalled under about eight million words of hodgepodge, a polarized staff, sit-in strikes, and a director who had to be sacked after an affair with an employee. Alsberg asked McHugh to take the job – a dubious personnel choice. Novelist as manager? McHugh accepted the challenge. He visited Washington for guidance but left quickly.
    "I never wanted to move to Washington," McHugh said later. "HQ was middle class and since I came from a working-class family I felt much more comfortable with the New York crowd."
    Back in New York, McHugh retrieved the only copy of the guidebook manuscript from the mayor’s office, where it was being held hostage. Mayor La Guardia was so worried by the warts-and-all portrait of the city that he threatened to pulp the manuscript. McHugh managed to pry the draft free but within a day it was stolen by one of the staff, who were bitterly divided between Trotskyites and Stalinists. After recovering the draft again, McHugh set about improving it. Eventually he got it on track toward publication as two volumes.
    As New York director, McHugh subverted Alsberg’s more arcane encyclopedic tendencies and refocused on the human details his staff found at the neighborhood level. In his 1943 novel, he would embrace the city through a science-fiction conceit: a pandemic of happiness and promiscuity breaks over everyone in New York. In a world consumed by fear and war, Manhattan becomes a beachhead of desire. Lawrence Ferlinghetti calls I Am Thinking of My Darling "one of those key forgotten novels that so acutely articulates a certain pre-World War II sensibility."
    McHugh himself got caught up in the hunt for the city’s stories and hit the pavement for fact-checking. Darling shows an intimacy with nooks and crannies of the city’s inner mechanisms, including the Weather Bureau on top of the Whitehall Building (see page 66 of the WPA guide). Against the sleepy, bureaucratic desks (“rather like the offices of an old-line shipping firm in the 1890s”) the windows reveal a thrilling seascape:
I looked out the high windows … There was no land in sight under us. Like the view from a clipper’s main truck. Governors Island in its eighteenth-century neatness of a fortified place, the Brooklyn shore, the hump of Staten Island in the blue. A quarter mile off the Battery, a middle-sized liner was being pushed in circles by three merry tugs, her siren going like a wounded bull.

McHugh helmed a staff of 500, including a young John Cheever. A high-school dropout from Quincy, Massachusetts, Cheever grumbled about his re-write work but was absorbing everything from waitresses’ conversation to Russian novels to the hyperreal world of European surrealists who had sought asylum in New York. Cheever’s stories later show those currents: “The Enormous Radio” channels the unkempt desires and frustrations of an apartment building’s residents through the frequencies of an errant home console, a “powerful and ugly instrument, with its mistaken sensibility to discord.”
    After McHugh left the WPA job in 1938, Cheever and a few others worked the guide into final shape for the printer. Cheever wrote several section introductions, including one for Manhattan. Michael Chabon, a fan of the guide, also found Cheever’s fingerprints in the guide’s description of a day at Coney Island.
    The late Grace Paley, who grew up in the East Bronx, saw how the WPA connected writers to the city. The Writers’ Project, Paley said, was “marvelous at helping people to find their own ears by getting them talking about what their lives were really like.”
    The WPA Guide to New York City came out in June 1939. McHugh had helped infuse it with what Chabon calls “the democratic, all-encompassing impulse that people have been using to look at New York City at least since the time of Walt Whitman.” In turn McHugh, notes Mark Singer, had become “enthralled by the whole business: tunnels, bridges, subways, public utilities, emergency services, harbor management, health care delivery…” and threw it into his next novel along with a highball of sex.
    Before starting his novel, though, McHugh proposed a nonfiction book called New York Underground, devoted to the subterranean labyrinth of entrails and subway lines. Publishers nixed the proposal because by then, wartime security concerns put the project off limits -- too much potential as a map for terrorists.

High School Student Digs into the FWP, Comes up with Gold

2010-05-19T19:36:00.001-04:00

The History Day competition spurred an Iowa high school student to delve into her great-grandfather's work on the Federal Writers' Project, and come out fascinated. Yashila Permeswaran gained recognition in her Le Mars middle school for the depth of the research she did in writing, "The WPA: Innovatively Providing Relief to Unemployed Writers Through the Federal Writers' Project." The theme of this year's contest is "Innovation in History: Impact and Change."
"I love learning about the 1930s because I think it is such an interesting time period," Permeswaran told the Daily Sentinel. "I think it's amazing all the people who were helped because the WPA gave them jobs. I also find it amazing all the history and culture that was recorded and preserved by the FWP."
She interviewed her great-grandfather for the paper about his work with the WPA. Good luck, Yashila!

Opening Doors to Expression

2010-05-08T17:47:00.004-04:00

This week the FDR Library's blog noted the anniversary of WPA opening its doors and sending Americans back to work, less than a month after Congress passed the bill authorizing the relief agency. It also has great reading recommendations.

In a couple weeks join us at LitArtlantic, a free festival of four storytelling arts at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD (May 20-22) when we will open doors to creative expression, exploring the intersections of music, film, theatre and literature. I'll be there for a panel talk about "The Writer's Life: A Report from the Field," on Saturday, May 22 at noon. I'll be mixing it up with fellow writers C.M. Mayo (whose novel just appeared in paperback), Alan Elsner, Kevin Quirk and Jessie Seigel. Learn more here.

Retracing Architecture in the Magnolia State

2010-04-28T18:31:00.001-04:00

Interesting post today on a blog about historic preservation in Mississippi, on the evolving understanding of the state's architectural roots. The WPA guide held one of the first attempts to wrestle that history onto the page; this annotated discussion and the back-and-forth that follows it takes it forward.

Spring in Arizona

2010-04-21T18:28:00.001-04:00

With spring comes a blooming of books: this week marks the anniversaries of the WPA guides to Arizona (70 years ago) and Washington, DC (73 years).
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Arizona guidebook includes the work of the peripatetic Harry Partch, who's recalled now mainly for his music and his invention of new instruments for playing it. (The song “Harry Partch” by Beck uses Partch’s 43-tone scale. Thanks, Wikipedia.) But Partch flirted with becoming a writer before he settled on music, and his wide sense of the world informs his compositions from U.S. Highball to “Daphne of the Dunes.” It’s not clear if Partch is responsible, but the Arizona guide’s essay on the arts notes that the state’s landscapes inspired compositions ranging from Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite and Victor Young’s Arizona Sketches to Cadman’s Land of the Sky Blue Water. And the guidebook's section on folklore lovingly describes musical instruments brought by immigrant groups, including the gusle: “something like a mandolin, with goatskin across the sounding box and strands of horsehair for string”; played with a bow, it made the perfect accompaniment to a song like “Underground in America,” Lazar Jurich’s lament of a Serbian miner.

75 Years of WPA Today

2010-04-08T18:39:00.002-04:00

To mark today's 75th anniversary of the Works Progress Administration, here's a roundup of blog postings around, from Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania to southern Texas, where Zora Neale Hurston's niece Lucy Ann Hurston will be speaking in a few days. There's also an artful selection of WPA posters here to commemorate the date. And in two days an exhibit celebrating the WPA legacy in California will open in Berkeley, and will run through August.

On the policy front, bloggers from Deepak Bhargava to Sarah VonEsch and The Progressive Pulse call for something like WPA's jobs program to address today's unemployment crisis, citing local movements and national initiatives, including Jobs for America Now. There are plans for a march for jobs next month. Which all points to the currency of that history in the dialogue about our present.

John Wiley & Sons, the publisher of Soul of a People, plans to issue a digital edition of the book this spring, and the Smithsonian Channel will release the dvd of Soul of a People: Writing America's Story on June 29th.

West Virginia pilots a state Writers' Project

2010-04-02T10:21:00.000-04:00

The School of Journalism at West Virginia University recently announced a three-county pilot effort in a West Virginia Writers' Project, with several positions for people gathering oral histories in Pocahontas, Greenbrier, and Monroe counties using multimedia. Contact information is here for learning more. Go, Mountain State!

Another Chronicler of Life on the Street

2010-04-01T10:00:00.000-04:00

From Lyle Saxon we pause to recall David Mills, who died the other day after finishing work on Treme, a new effort to trace life in New Orleans after Katrina. Mills had started in journalism and moved to television mini-series as a way to dramatize life more completely. He went from showing life in DC for The Washington Post to showing a certain life in Baltimore on The Wire, and memorializing New Orleans in Treme. The portraits he helped to create will continue to move people.

Louisiana in Your Palm

2010-03-17T16:00:00.002-04:00

Next week marks the publication anniversary of the WPA guide to Louisiana, a statewide scavenger hunt that New Orleanian Lyle Saxon guided from fieldwork to bookstore. Saxon was an unlikely choice to manage such an undertaking. In 1935 he was a used-up journalist moping around a plantation house in the sticks, teaching his hens to perform stupid tricks.
    But Saxon loved storytelling. In the 1920s he’d befriended some of the best American writers of the decade, including Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. Saxon wanted to do for Louisiana what Faulkner was doing for Mississippi: capture all its vitality in big, hearty novels. He started a novel with great hopes but by the mid-1930s, his youthful energy was spent.
    “I’m getting ready to die through sheer lack of interest in life,” Saxon confided in his diary in 1933. His love of fiction showed itself mainly in compulsive book-buying sprees. “What insanity,” he wrote after spending nearly $400 on books. He often got drunk alone. One day he looked in the mirror and wrote, “Where is that man that I used to be? Have I lost him completely?”
    He needed a challenge to shake him out of himself. When he received a letter from Washington in 1935 asking him to be state director of the Louisiana Writers’ Project, he accepted.

    The job proved a bureaucratic headache, but he kept with it and documented Louisiana life in two well-praised guidebooks (Louisiana and New Orleans) and a boisterous book of state folklore titled Gumbo Ya-Ya.
    All three books are among the growing number now available as pdfs from the Prelinger Library's digital collection. (All the guides are in the public domain; thanks, Uncle Sam.) The Prelinger list includes Arizona, California, Here’s New England, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York City, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, U.S. One: Maine to Florida, and Virginia.
    They're all searchable, adaptable to your handheld on your next trip, and more portable than the 1,000-plus-page WPA guide to Washington, D.C., which FDR joked should come with its own steamer trunk.

The Hook - 16th VA Book Fest; 16 lit picks

2010-03-12T15:57:00.000-05:00

The Hook - COVER- Sweet 16: 16th Book Fest; 16 lit picks

Zora and Women Artists Day

2010-02-19T08:41:00.002-05:00

The blog for WomenArts has a thoughtful post noting the 75th anniversary of the WPA programs and the third annual Support Women Artists Now (SWAN) Day, coming up on March 27. Martha Richards notes the daunting obstacles that women artists faced then and now: "We put in long hours for under-staffed non-profits or juggle several part-time jobs along with childcare duties," and still often get overlooked in surveys of the workforce and the economy.

Richards highlights WPA writers Eudora Welty, whose experiences as a publicity assistant and photographer fed her first short stories, and Zora Neale Hurston, a main figure in Soul of a People (see my 8/18/09 post). Hurston's great gift, said Alice Walker, was showing her characters "relishing the pleasure of each other's loquacious and bodacious company." Richards then looks forward another 75 years with the hope that women artists will continue to celebrate each other's bodacious company, in good times and bad.
Watch their website and Facebook page for SWAN Day plans and opportunities.

Snowdigger, a life history

2010-02-10T15:41:00.006-05:00

As Washington, DC gets a record load of snow dumped outside, it calls to mind a WPA life history from New Orleans, blending life and death and looking for work. New Orleanian Melinda Parker told one WPA interviewer about a visit she got from her long-dead brother Jim:

"Just the other day I was sitting down here by my stove, praying to the Lord, when who walks in the door but my brother that's dead. He used to live in Detroit so I always called him a snowdigger. I says to him, 'What you doin' down here now, you snowdigger?' And he says, 'I just had some money an' I thought I'd come an' give it to you.' And he puts five dollars in my lap. Just then it looked to me like my brother that's a minister comes in the door and he turns to my brother and says, 'Jim, what you doin' here?' And Jim says, 'I come to give Melinda some money.' So my brother that's a minister, he gives me five dollars. I got so excited about havin' that money for Christmas that I went out the house and was goin' to tell my friend and was all the way to Saratoga Street and the money was gone ... I told my brother that's a minister about it on Christmas Day and he said that Jim knew that I'm lookin' for a job and that his spirit is goin' to help me find one soon."

The full interview is at the Library of Congress WPA life histories page.

Black History Month and the Writers' Project

2010-02-01T17:42:00.002-05:00

This marks the start of Black History Month, and also the month in 1941 when Richard Wright published 12 Million Black Voices, his photo essay on black life and history. A collaboration with photographers of the Farm Security Administration, the book showed in almost cinematic sweep the journey that African Americans had made from Africa through slavery to the 20th century.
As novelist David Bradley says in his interview for Soul of a People: Writing America's Story, Wright pored over the FSA photographs, armed with the history he had gathered, and found inspiration: "So he's looking at these pictures, and he's seeing himself. He's seeing his own experience, he's seeing alter egos, he's seeing where he might have ended up..."
For Black History Month, Smithsonian Networks will rebroadcast the film, starting February 2.

Juanita Brooks, Courageous Historian of the Southwest

2010-01-18T09:46:00.003-05:00

Last Friday marked the 112^th anniversary of the birth of Juanita Brooks, premier Utah historian. Brooks was born January 15, 1898. This year also marks 60 years since the publication of her investigative masterpiece, The Mountain Meadows Massacre.

That 1950 book gave America a nuanced investigation into the hidden story of a slaughter by Mormon settlers in southwestern Utah of a group of migrants bound for California in 1857. In it, Brooks wrote penetratingly about Utah and the people who lived there.

A Mormon herself, Brooks uncovered long-hidden pioneer diaries while on the Writers’ Project in Utah in the 1930s. Working late at night on a typewriter in her kitchen, she continued to explore the episode for years, as recounted in her remarkable memoir, Quicksand and Cactus. Her persistence and publication defied church elders, who tried to keep the massacre hidden. Every epic about Utah from that time up to the HBO series Big Love has had to reckon with that episode of mass murder and cover-up.

Jon Krakauer called Mountain Meadows Massacre “groundbreaking … an extraordinary work of history.” With it, noted the Salt Lake Tribune just over a year ago, Brooks provided a “painful reminder that the propensity for unspeakable violence resides in every human heart," and began a journey that concluded recently with the Mormon church finally issuing its own report on the massacre. An example of brave exposure for this Martin Luther King Day.

Best Books of 2009

2010-01-05T12:30:00.002-05:00

Thrilled to find Soul of a Peopleon the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Best Books of 2009 list.
Happy New Year and best wishes for 2010!

Jobs and the WPA Guide to Florida

2009-12-18T17:15:00.007-05:00

The WPA Guide to Florida, which marks its 70^th anniversary this week, is unlike other travel guides, as I wrote in yesterday’s Florida Times-Union. The guide tells stories from the ground up, with little gloss. The entry for Belle Glade in one breath praises the area’s lush fertility and, in the next, acknowledges that African-Americans working the harvest had to be, by law, “off the streets by 10:30 p.m.” As Stetson Kennedy, one Florida WPA writer, recently told a St. Augustine blog, “We wanted to show the warts, like the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and Jim Crow laws,” not just palms and bathing beauties.

The WPA guide came out amid an anxious campaign blitz. In December 1939, as America emerged from the worst of the Depression, a divide remained between many skeptics of the New Deal and the WPA scribblers. A WPA job, as a former WPA worker says in Blake Bailey’s biography of John Cheever, was “a stigma of the lowest order, a dark and embarrassing symbol of a time of their lives when circumstances beyond their control compelled them to admit, on public record, personal defeat.”

Zora Neale Hurston felt that sting. For decades she didn’t want to mark any WPA anniversary. Yet the WPA job saw Hurston through a hard time, and for the Florida guide she wrote up heartbreaking episodes and rich folk tales that people on the Gulf Coast told each other. (There's more on Hurston and Kennedy in Soul of a People.)

Then as now, any federal job program was a hot-button issue. A Gallup poll in 1939 found that in the run-up to a presidential election, more voters ranked WPA relief as the worst part of FDR’s government than any other — far ahead of farm subsidies, foreign policy or even packing the Supreme Court. Yet, the same poll also found that more respondents (28 percent) ranked WPA relief as his greatest accomplishment.

Some WPA writers found the experience of producing the WPA books an education. I mentioned in an earlier post an event in 1983 where Ralph Ellison, who began writing fiction while on the WPA, defended it as more than make-work. The WPA, he said, ushered people’s history into official history, and allowed an “intermixture between the formal and the folk — the real experience of people as they feel it.”

Now as the unemployment rate hovers in double digits and we consider the recent jobs summit, we might open the WPA Guide to Florida for more than landmarks and customs. It might inspire the kind of employment that brings future benefits and a clearer view of where we are.

WGA TV Award Nomination for Soul

2009-12-15T11:55:00.003-05:00

WGA TV Award Nominations

Hollywood: Soul of a People brings the WPA writers to the limelight.

Meridel Le Sueur Pioneered Women's Stories on the WPA

2009-12-07T15:34:00.006-05:00

In the 1930s a young Meridel Le Sueur was living in Minnesota and writing about how desperate poverty pushed law-abiding women across the line of criminality. She was going to meetings with women in the Workers Alliance, writing “to raise our miserable circumstances to the level of sagas.” She had published several articles in New Masses, Anvil and other lefty magazines before she got a job on the Writers’ Project. (More in Soul of a People.)

On her own time, Le Sueur wrote up the stories of her fellow women, and in her novel The Girl, she created a composite portrait of a female character forced by circumstances to work at a speakeasy, which leads her to work as a prostitute, and later as a getaway driver in a bank holdup that goes wrong. The protagonist is eventually rescued by a group of homeless women who are probably communists.

When the novel was finally published in the 1970s, Le Sueur was known as a pioneer in the women’s movement. She called the book a “hosanna” from one generation of women to the next, a shout of joy and strength to “those wonderful women … who keep us all alive.”

“It was a white culture up to then,” Le Sueur said at a reunion of WPA writers in the 1980s. “There was no black movement,” she explained, “no women’s culture” on the radar before the 1930s. By gathering these stories, the WPA writers paved the way for new American histories.

Watch a free screening of Soul of a People this Wednesday at the American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Le Sueur's work was featured recently at the St. Paul public library.

Cold Thanksgiving on the Great Lakes

2009-11-27T11:50:00.007-05:00

For this Thanksgiving weekend, a story of friendship and a holiday on the seas from Michigander Fred Smith, interviewed by WPA writer Jerome Power in the 1930s at the home of Smith's sister.

Smith was born in Iona, Michigan in 1885 and at 13 stowed away on a sailing ship to become a sailor on the Great Lakes. At age 52, he had broad shoulders, a rolling gait, “bronzed features” and a ready smile. For a sailor, he had “less than usual profanity and blasphemy in his speech.” His story about friend and fellow mariner Jack McNellis:

I have a vivid memory of how he was initiated as a wheel man many years ago. We were in Duluth, about Thanksgiving time, when we both shipped as part of the crew to take a yacht through the lakes to Brooklyn, New York. The name of the yacht was the "Salt Lake City". She had what is known as an open bridge, that is, the man at the wheel had no protection against the weather. Jack had experience as a wheel man and thought he was pretty good, too. The skipper assigned him to the wheel, which was all right with Jack, since that work pays more money than an ordinary A.B. He forgot to figure on the weather, however, on Lake Superior, at that late season. Cold rain, snow, sleet like bullets and plenty of fog was the daily dish. Poor Jack was so frozen when he came off duty that he could barely get the ice out of his system before it was time to take the wheel again. We kidded him a lot but I am quite certain he would have died rather than funk on the job. He stuck and we brought the yacht to Brooklyn without more than the usual difficulty … Jack and I are great friends and when we meet these days always talk about this trip, taken when we were both young sailors.

Smith’s story is on the Library of Congress site. Next week if you’re in Battle Creek, catch a free screening of Soul of a People.

Taking it to the Rocky Mountain State

2009-11-21T17:08:00.005-05:00

In Denver, before an event at the Tattered Cover bookstore, I sat down with Gloria Johnston of Swing Vote magazine and Louie Wolfe at his BBQ spot on East Colfax St. near the state capitol. We talked about the WPA guides that Louie had collected through the years and how they'd guided his travels. And we talked about the WPA writers including Weldon Kees, who came to Denver after leaving behind his job on the Nebraska Writers’ Project, and his friend Rudolph Umland who came to visit him, and was surprised to find Kees had turned to poetry (with the encouragement of another WPA friend, as described in the book).

Louie suggested that before leaving Denver I visit Red Rocks, the park west of the city where an amphitheatre is set into the scarlet sandstone walls. He told me that Red Rocks had its own New Deal connection: the theatre was built by CCC workers. The WPA guide to Colorado calls them “public-spirited citizens” and notes that in the silt deposit layers of the stone walls where you can see “shells, teeth of curious fish, and plants,” archaeologists found the nine-foot-long thigh bone of an Atlantosaurus.

So I drove toward the mountains one afternoon and wandered the park as the late sun lit up the stone and the bare bronze back of the CCC worker statue.

Talking Books in the Texas Legislature

2009-11-11T18:29:00.004-05:00

The recent Texas Book Festival featured, once again, authors discussing their books in the halls of the state capitol building, from literary biography in the House to novelists in the Senate. In one annex room, an SRO crowd reassessed the Writers’ Project and whether its members were un-American (as Congressman Martin Dies, of East Texas, had deemed as first chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities) or very American (as Jim Thompson, sometime-resident of Ft. Worth and the West Texas oil fields, had insisted).
Others in the Austin fray this year included Richard Russo, Jane Smiley, John Pipkin on Thoreau’s misdemeanors, and Douglas Brinkley on Teddy Roosevelt.

“I Was Picketing with a Camera”

2009-10-22T09:44:00.008-04:00

Documentary pioneer Leo Seltzer, whose 1930s films are featured in the film Soul of a People, is the subject of my post today on the Writer's Center blog, First Person Plural. In his 90s, Leo shared his experience and views with me in several conservations in his home in Manhattan. He also shared a rare print of the film he made for the WPA Art Project in 1938.

Many Voices Sounding from the 1930s

2009-10-20T16:29:00.000-04:00

This post honors the range of voices that emerged from the Writers’ Project. Marking crime novelist Jim Thompson’s 103rd birthday a few weeks ago, my piece on his work with the Oklahoma Writers’ Project is now posted on the Smithsonian Channel’s site. Thompson’s empathy with criminals and crime victims alike comes through in his writings for the WPA and in the true-crime pieces that he was writing for pulp magazines like True Detective and Master Detective.
Meanwhile in the Upper Midwest, Meridel Le Sueur was documenting struggles of women in her circle in St. Paul in her own take on the crime novel, The Girl, finally published only a decade ago. And in Madison, Aldo Leopold was capturing a quieter voice of the land in the Conservation essay for the WPA guide to Wisconsin. Earlier this month I had a chance to visit his Shack outside Baraboo, WI, where Leopold and his family forged a new land ethic, planting thousands of trees, restoring prairie habitat, and listening. There Leopold would hone the ideas that shaped A Sand County Almanac, another empathetic rendering of an American viewpoint some distance away from Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me.
A remarkable collection of WPA writers’ off-duty work is American Stuff, a 1937 anthology published by Viking that showcased their personal poetry, songs and stories – everything from convict songs that John Lomax recorded in Southern prison camps, to Thompson’s murderous “The End of the Book,” Richard Wright’s explosive “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” poems by Helen Neville, Claude McKay and Kenneth Rexroth (subject of a recent talk in San Jose), a story by Vardis Fisher, and woodcuts by WPA artists. American Stuff could bear reprinting.

Harvey Pekar Channels Studs Terkel and Honors Oral History

2009-10-13T20:30:00.000-04:00

“Why Studs Terkel?” asked the man on stage at the Wisconsin Book Festival Sunday. “Why Harvey Pekar?”
Indeed. Paul Buhle, an oral historian and emeritus professor from Brown University, was asking the questions, having enlisted cartoonist Pekar of American Splendor fame to adapt Terkel’s mighty Working as a graphic novel.
“Harvey is exactly the kind of person that Studs looked for” in his interviews, Buhle said, and the kind of person the WPA writers interviewed in the 1930s. Pekar worked as a wage slave for 37 years, a file clerk in a VA hospital in Ohio, unknown and yet full of stories. (He interviewed many of the patients he met in the hospital.) At the festival, Pekar spoke with trademark honesty and humor about his little pleasures: a flattering remark, a bit of cash, and the spice of getting back at somebody who’d slighted him. He also talked about his love of jazz, his biggest literary influence (Henry Miller), his respect for Terkel, and how listening to comedy radio in the 1940s shaped how he approaches pacing and rhythm in his comics.
His discussion included Terkel’s legacy as an oral historian and beginnings on the Federal Writers’ Project. He said he wanted to bring the stories of Working to new readers in a new format.

An Important Piece of Our Cultural Heritage

2009-10-04T11:27:00.000-04:00

John Woods, in his review, says Soul of a People consists of "the stories and history of arguably an important piece of our twentieth century cultural heritage along with insights into what life was like during the Depression. For this reason alone, it is worth reading, but beyond that, any aspiring writer should appreciate that even for the great writers, things didn’t always come easily."
Open Salon gives the book a 98 - "Highly recommended," and points to where some of the WPA guides have been digitized and made available online.

Looking at History a New Way

2009-09-30T10:18:00.000-04:00

On the National Mall last weekend, the National Book Festival brought out more than 100,000 readers and book lovers, an encouraging sight. In the History tent, we discussed the Federal Writers' Project and its democratic experiment, and the challenged posed to it in 1938 by the House Un-American Activities Committee under Martin Dies. Douglas Brinkley affirmed the influence of the FWP across decades and literary careers. And we noted the recent passing of Milton Meltzer, a WPA author who went on to write nearly 100 ground-breaking history books and receive the ALA Laura Ingalls Wilder medal in 2001. Meltzer invigorated history books for children with a new sense of America. Meltzer once asked, “What is the relevance of all this history to the young?” And he answered: “Ours is not a past of sweetness and light, no matter what the textbook tells us.”
This weekend Soul of a People events continue in Baltimore and Fairfax, Virginia.

1930s culture coming to a screen near you...

2009-09-22T13:31:00.000-04:00

This Saturday the 26th I'll be at the National Book Festival talking with historian Douglas Brinkley about the WPA writers and what they found in 1930s America. Doug generously wrote the foreword for Soul of a People and appears in the film. After our talk in the History tent we'll head to the C-SPAN tent for a call-in show around 11 am.

This Saturday is also Museum Day, and for that Smithsonian magazine offers a coupon for free admission at hundreds of museums across the United States. Find a participating museum near you, and then find out if they're showing Soul of a People that day (some are). Then let us know what you think about the Writers' Project as an experiment in democracy.

Morris Dickstein has a fine essay in the current American Scholar about 1930s American culture, including the WPA Writers' Project and how they portrayed "an America under siege, gazing inward, taking an inventory of itself 150 years after becoming a nation." As if to underscore its significance, the National Book Foundation's poll this week, choosing the best National Book Award fiction author ever, includes three former WPA writers (Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty and John Cheever) among its six finalists.

Illinois Guide Anniversary and a Voice Against Intolerance

2009-09-16T17:27:00.000-04:00

Seventy years ago today, the WPA guide to Illinois came out as controversy swirled around the Federal Writers’ Project. Texas congressman Martin Dies was deep in the investigations of his House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities, better known as HUAC, and within weeks he would bring his investigation to Chicago, interrogating witnesses and launching raids on offices across the city. In Chicago, his list of suspected un-Americans included 514 milkmen, 144 newspaper reporters, 112 lawyers, and 161 radio workers.

Meanwhile in the Writers’ Project office, Nelson Algren, Margaret Walker, Sam Ross, Hilda Polacheck and others had shifted from work on the guide (Algren had written much of the text on Galena, among other tasks) to documenting interviews with a cross-section of the city’s residents – jazz musicians, barflies, aldermen, fishmongers, prostitutes, and meatpackers. Their first-hand accounts are on the Library of Congress American Memory site (searchable by key word like ‘Chicago’) and make a vivid complement to the Illinois guidebook.

Studs Terkel worked in the creative radio division (Chicago was one of the rare cities that had such a unit), writing scripts for weekly programs -- many of them researched with curators at the Art Institute, in a series titled Men of Art -- along with Sam Ross and others. Ross later wrote scripts in Hollywood, and Terkel later conducted interviews for radio and Pulitzer-winning books that he called oral histories. In the Soul of a People film interview (and in the book) he credits the WPA with getting him started as a writer, and with giving many people the sense that their voice counted.

Not long after Martin Dies left Chicago, a radio play that Terkel wrote for the WPA was broadcast, on the nineteenth-century French satirist Honoré Daumier. In words that spoke to the air of fear stirred by HUAC, Terkel’s Daumier responds to the concern that he mocked France with his satirical cartoons about the king:

I love France with all my heart… It’s not ridiculing France, it’s not mocking France. I’m fighting the enemy of France within its gates: greed, intolerance, ignorance.’

Last week Soul of a People screened, appropriately, in Chicago at the Newberry Library, and in the coming month Chicago State University and the Maywood Public Library are hosting more events and celebrations in Chicagoland. Check details at http://library.csu.edu/presentations/soap.html.

Hearing a Culture Change in Florida

2009-08-18T14:51:00.000-04:00

Seventy years ago this month, Zora Neale Hurston began a landmark field recording tour, traveling down through Florida’s hot coastal towns and turpentine camps, gathering songs that people sang to each other: hard songs and mythic stories, with all the power and struggle of life.

Hurston had mapped out the Florida tour in her head, with stops chosen to get Spanish-influenced songs, African-flavored songs, and tunes harking back to Old English. Then she wrote up her plan in a memo and sent it to Washington.

As her younger white colleague Stetson Kennedy remembered, Hurston called folklore the “boiled down pot liquor of human living,” and prized it dearly. She knew the world was changing and that cultures would continue to collide and make new things in those collisions, but she aimed to capture the essence of what had come down to her.

Her plan finally got support with the loan of a state-of-the-art recording machine – a massive beast that required two men to carry – from the Library of Congress.

Just weeks before the end of her time on the WPA, the recording tour she proposed came about and the converted ambulance hauling the recording machine rolled into Jacksonville. She began at a soup kitchen there, recording gospel songs across town from the state office of the WPA Writers’ Project where the white WPA writers worked. Because of Jim Crow segregation, the half dozen African-Americans on the Florida staff worked from another office near the soup kitchen. Hurston herself worked mostly from her hometown of Eatonville.

Songs that she and her WPA coworkers recorded that summer (and again that winter) would roil through American popular culture for decades. “The Sloop John B,” for example: the WPA recordings capture Bahamian and Dixieland versions of the song, which dates back to 1900. It would later have incarnations in folk music, then rock and roll, ending up on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. "Ninety-nine and Half Won't Do," a gospel song, would get a soul version from Wilson Pickett.

Iconoclast Rode the Rails for the WPA Guides

2009-08-07T10:10:00.001-04:00

A number of hoboes made their way from freight cars to the federal payroll of the WPA Writers’ Project. The Soul of a People book features the stories of three: Rudolph Umland in Nebraska (featured in this review and this online exhibit), Eluard Luchell McDaniel in California, and Harry Partch.

Partch was born in California, grew up in Arizona, and as a young man bounced around the West, feeling freer among hoboes than in straight-laced society. Partch would later become famous as an avant-garde composer whose works were so iconoclastic that he had to create new instruments and scales for them. In between his times on the bum, he worked on the WPA guides to Arizona and California. He later memorialized his wanderings in U.S. Highball, which the Kronos Quartet recorded in the 1990s. John Rockwell, the New York Times critic, called Partch’s compositions “the musical counterpart to the Watts Towers,” that monument of folk art that rose over the working class L.A. neighborhood.

Partch will be featured at a September event in the Soul of a People series at the San Jose Public Library. The Harry Partch Foundation is based in San Diego.

More about Harry Partch from that talk here.

You can now watch the Writers’ Project afternoon at the Library of Congress with excerpts from the film. Click here.

Smithsonian Channel Gears Up for the 1930s

2009-07-23T20:19:00.000-04:00

With the Soul of a People film screened in Chicago last week and slated for national broadcast on September 6th, the Smithsonian Channel is getting ready and has posted my talk with web producer Gina Buchanan, about the WPA guides, where you can find them, the WPA Writers' Project as reality show (featuring Louis L'Amour and Harry Partch), and what you can discover in their work now. And what would we find if we retrace their routes today? The sound quality is truly vintage! Show them I have friends and have a listen here.

An Almanac entry for Magicians Day

2009-07-16T18:39:00.000-04:00

This summer marks the 70th anniversary of the California WPA guide, the only Book-of-the-Month selection among the guidebooks. We also pause to note the 1939 San Francisco almanac (subtitled "An Almanac for Thirty-niners") and its observance of Magicians Day on July 16. Sounds like something Kenneth Rexroth, while editing in the WPA San Francisco office, would have appreciated. The following day's entry marks the anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone, in 1853, of the city's first cathedral, Old St. Mary's, on Grant Ave. and California Street. Check out California's Living New Deal Project for landmarks in 1930s California today.

2009-07-10T15:03:00.000-04:00

You can now see the Soul of a People talk filmed for CSPAN's BookTV online. Good questions! Good discussion! Check it out.

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of the WPA guide to Nebraska (Soul of a People includes the story of how that guidebook was edited by Rudolph Umland, a former hobo, and poet-novelist-painter Weldon Kees, among others.) It's still a good read, and one of my favorites in the series.

Public Enemies and the WPA Writers

2009-07-01T09:14:00.000-04:00

Today the film Public Enemies hits screens across the country, with Johnny Depp playing John Dillinger. Reviewers note how Dillinger and other 1930s outlaws capitalized on the unpopularity of banks to boost their popular support. You see reflections of that atmosphere in the WPA guides and in the stories the WPA writers gathered.

In the Wisconsin guide, for instance, you find on Tour 7 the lodge where Dillinger holed up with Baby Face Nelson and others in Little Bohemia, and where his father later opened a curiosity museum of his son’s gangster friends. (More about this in the book.) And in the WPA life history of a kindergarten teacher in South Jacksonville, Florida, you hear her concern about her “little kindergartners’” impressions of life from pop culture and "the five-year old who strives to imitate Dillinger and struts about in imaginary defiance of the G-men.”

The Great Depression shaped what you could either call either a jaundiced view of the world or one with few illusions. So that the 1939 WPA almanac to San Francisco (subtitled an almanac for “Thirty-niners”) has a wry account of a disastrous July Fourth celebration in 1854, where everything possible went wrong. Americans of the 1930s saw a world that held both farm foreclosures and bank robberies, a world that Woody Guthrie captured in the last two stanzas of “Pretty Boy Floyd”:

Well as through this world I’ve rambled

I’ve seen lots of funny men

Some will rob you with a six gun

And some with a fountain pen

But if through this world you wander

If through this world you roam

You won’t ever see an outlaw

Drive a family from their home.

More Soul of a People events this summer

2009-06-24T08:05:00.001-04:00

Fun events exploring the Writers' Project and its discoveries of American life continue at libraries across the country this summer and into the fall. Besides those listed below in an earlier post, there are more posted in Connecticut, Illinois, Missouri, Montana, Long Island, NY, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia. The Wichita library, which is holding a Life in the 1930s event this Sunday, has added an impressive digital exhibit on hard times, renewal and resilience in Kansas here.

More will be coming in Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan (never realized there were so many 'M' states), Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. A list of websites for all the participating libraries is at the site of the American Library Association.

Seeing the Shadow City: Anniversary for the WPA Guide to New York City

2009-06-22T17:20:00.000-04:00

Seventy years ago this week, the WPA Guide to New York City came out amid a campaign blitz of jingles and quiz games. In 1939, as America emerged from the worst of the Depression, the “working press” that remained after a decade of contraction of the publishing industry assessed the work of people holding “welfare jobs” on the WPA. A job on the WPA Writers’ Project carried “a stigma of the lowest order,” as a former WPA editor observed, “a dark and embarrassing symbol of a time of their lives when circumstances beyond their control compelled them to admit, on public record, personal defeat.” John Cheever and others felt that sting, and for decades nobody wanted to revisit it.

At the time, they hoped that the guide would speak for itself. In 1938, Richard Wright had whetted the appetites of New York radio listeners for the WPA guide, promising that the guidebook would “go behind the scenes and show that phase of Harlem which the casual visitor or tourist does not see.” When the guide came out on June 24,1939 English novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner gave an interview during a visit to the WPA offices on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, where she proclaimed the Writers’ Project “the most exciting experiment that has ever been carried out.” The New York Times reviewer called the guidebook “a dictionary to the city” sprinkled with engaging history and contemporary stories; it “should find a place in every New York household.”

For decades, the guide was passed among people curious about that changing landscape. Michael Chabon used the New York guide as a walking companion for months as he prowled the streets and subway lines while researching The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Grace Paley, having grown up in the Bronx in the 1940s, understood how the WPA connected its writers to the city. The Writers’ Project, she said, was “marvelous at helping people to find their own ears” and getting people “talking about what their lives were really like.” And the legendary Times editor R.W. Apple, Jr. used the WPA guides often in his travels, having been a fan since he came across the Virginia volume during a stint in the Army in the late 1950s and it led him to ruined plantation homes that had fallen off other maps.

When I came upon the New York City guide, its short list of the editorial staff, with Wright and Cheever nestled amid less-remembered names, intrigued me. I loved the cinematic capsules of life in the neighborhood essays. But beyond the stylistic turns, it was often simple facts that made me pause: the catalog of radio call letters, subway routes, and accounts of sidewalk hawkers and preachers.

Many of the WPA writers found the experience of producing the book an opportunity for interpreting their own histories. At a panel held at the New York Public Library in 1983, Ralph Ellison defended the WPA regional and ethnic histories. “One of the things that the WPA did,” he said, “was to allow that intermixture between the formal and the folk -- the real experience of people as they feel it.” The WPA books filled gaps that “official” history had left blank, including African-American history. “Let’s face it,” he said, “you couldn’t find the truth about my background in that history.”

With the invocations of the Great Depression today, the most striking parallel may be the searching and sifting process itself, the effort to make sense of things in hard times after years when there was little will to question the status quo. That kind of sifting may appear to be a process of restating simple facts about our lives and then finding something new.

“We are a country which improvises,” Ellison said that evening at the library. “We are creating American history ... We must still improvise our culture and we do that best when we make use of all that is at hand.”

Traveling to Carolina with the WPA Guide

2009-06-11T18:29:00.000-04:00

For my trip to Durham, Raleigh and Chapel Hill last week I checked out the WPA guide to North Carolina from the local library. In Durham, WUNC host Frank Stasio had probing questions on the WPA experience and its relevance today -- you can hear the show online. We read from the 1939 guide about the work-day rhythm at the American Tobacco Factory building, now home to the WUNC studio along with other offices and restaurants, and Carolina-bred plott hounds.

At Quail Ridge Books that night, a lively discussion touched on the political factors that made the WPA arts projects happen: new legislation combined with protests by out-of-work writers and editors in early 1935. Any sign of policies like that coming up now? Stay tuned.

Grassroots history

2009-06-03T17:24:00.001-04:00

Not long ago I was in Richmond, VA to tape an interview with Liz Humes at WRIR and a talk about the Writers' Project at the Fountain Bookstore. A lot of good questions, which you'll get to hear when Book TV broadcasts the session sometime soon.

For now just two: One questioner drew the link between the Writers' Project and the recordings of folk songs and lore that came later, such as Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, issued by Folkways in the 1950s. Another asked how a comparable attempt today at getting local history and people's stories might get started. Libraries and their patrons -- and the discussions and events this summer and fall -- could be a good start. Many will include local historians talking about grassroots histories, and helping people record oral histories.

This Friday we head to North Carolina for a talk on WUNC's The State of Things and a gathering at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. See you there.

Soul of a People events and resources in the states

2009-05-08T11:51:00.000-04:00

Libraries are putting on a lively range of events nationwide, raising issues about the Writers' Project, its contributions and what it means for us now. Here are some fabulously rich sites for events in New Mexico, Kansas, and Tennessee.

Here are three more for events in Florida, Indiana and North Carolina. More coming...

Soul of a People at the Library of Congress

2009-04-29T15:56:00.001-04:00

Yesterday there was a good crowd at the Library of Congress despite the midafternoon timing for a panel about Soul of a People and the Federal Writers' Project. Andrea Kalin (the film's director), David Royle (Smithsonian ChannelHD) and Peggy Bulger (American Folklife Center) joined me in discussing how the book and film came about and what these stories mean. Peggy talked about how modern folklore grew out of the Writers' Project experience, and John Cole (Center for the Book) told a story about the Library's role in retrieving some of the lost files of the FWP.

Good questions on how the WPA guides got edited, and which FWP staff became activists from the experience. In time a webcast will be posted on the site of the Center for the Book, here.

Q&A on Mark Athitakis blog

2009-04-20T08:37:00.000-04:00

Mark Athitakis, whose book reviews have appeared Washington City Paper and elsewhere and whose blog has ranked on various lists of top literary blogs, posted a Q&A about Soul of a People here.

Richard Wright Honored by Former Employer

2009-04-15T07:54:00.001-04:00

In a long-0verdue acknowledgement of a native son, last week the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a stamp honoring Richard Wright. One of the better stories about it appeared on BetterEditor, which includes comments from Wright's daughter Julia on how her father's early job as a post office clerk inspired Barack Obama and many other African Americans who know the story of his rise. After Wright lost his job at the post office during the Great Depression, he found a spot on the Federal Writers' Project in Chicago. He researched the history of African Americans in Illinois and wrote essays for the WPA guide to Illinois, and later New York City, while writing and honing his fiction. It's fitting that the address where you send off for the first Wright stamps is a post office in Chicago.

Personal Efforts for Democracy

2009-04-09T07:52:00.000-04:00

In an article about life in China today you wouldn't expect to find a reminder of 1930s America and the Writers' Project, but yesterday's New York Times had this article, about a 75-year-old retired professor, Sun Wenguang, who was beaten while making a private visit to a cemetery to commemorate a sympathizer of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiannamen Square (not a student leader of the protests but a Communist Party leader sympathetic to them). Mr. Sun's action wasn't a public statement, so the brutality of thugs who didn't want him to remember that episode -- who wanted to erase the memory of pro-democracy sympathizers 20 years ago -- took him by surprise. "I didn't expect this," he admitted. "It was just a personal visit to a cemetery."

It can be easy to underestimate the power of private actions and seemingly apolitical thoughts. But in the 1930s when many Americans felt beaten down, the WPA guides and "life histories" documented ordinary people's experiences to show that they mattered. Benjamin Botkin, who led the effort to collect those life histories (or "oral histories") called them the country's living culture, and said that they show how a democracy functions. Soul of a People is a testimonial to that power of telling people's stories.

"In order to fight for democracy," said Mr. Sun from his hospital bed the other day, "we need to make personal efforts."

Introducing Soul of a People

2009-04-04T14:43:00.000-04:00

Soul of a People, my book about the Federal Writers' Project, is out and I'm happy that it's sparking dialogue about that episode and the people involved in it. The film that Andrea Kalin and I have co-directed is almost done and will be seen in a few months. Meanwhile Art Taylor had some probing questions in a Q&A he posted on his blog here.