Soul of a People

David A. Taylor

Description

Soul of a People is about a handful of people who were on the Federal Writer's Project in the 1930s and a glimpse of America at a turning point. This particular handful of characters went from poverty to great things later, and included John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Studs Terkel. In the 1930s they were all caught up in an effort to describe America in a series of WPA guides. Through striking images and firsthand accounts, the book reveals their experiences and the most vivid excerpts from selected guides and interviews: Harlem schoolchildren, truckers, Chicago fishmongers, Cuban cigar makers, a Florida midwife, Nebraskan meatpackers, and blind musicians.

Drawing on new discoveries from personal collections, archives, and recent biographies, a new picture has emerged in the last decade of how the participants' individual dramas intersected with the larger picture of their subjects. This book illuminates what it felt like to live that experience, how going from joblessness to reporting on their own communities affected artists with varied visions, as well as what feelings such a passage involved: shame humiliation, anger, excitement, nostalgia, and adventure. Also revealed is how the WPA writers anticipated, and perhaps paved the way for, the political movements of the following decades, including the Civil Rights movement, the Women's Right movement, and the Native American rights movement.
Foreword by Douglas Brinkley.

Acknowledgments.

Prologue.

Introduction: At a Crossroads.

1 The Writers' Project.

2 Point of Departure: New York.

3 Chicago and the Midwest.

4 Gathering Folklore, from Oklahoma to Harlem.

5 Rising Up in the West: Idaho.

6 Nailing a Freight on the Fly: Nebraska.

7 Poetic Land, Pugnacious People: California.

8 Raising the Dead in New Orleans.

9 Cigars and Turpentine in Florida.

10 American and Un-American: Back Around the Boroughs.

11 Converging on Washington.

12 Traveling Beyond.

Appendix: Resources for Readers and Travelers.

Sources.

Credits.

Index.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Años 1930
• Great Depression
• Federal Writers' Project
• American literature
• 1930s
• John Cheever
• United States
• The Great Depression
• Zora Neale Hurston
• Studs Terkel
• History
• Ralph Ellison
• Richard Wright

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780470885888
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
 
Title Page
Copyright Page
Foreword
Acknowledgements
PROLOGUE
Introduction
 
Chapter 1 - THE WRITERS’ PROJECT
Chapter 2 - POINT OF DEPARTURE: NEW YORK
Chapter 3 - CHICAGO AND THE MIDWEST
Chapter 4 - GATHERING FOLKLORE, FROM OKLAHOMA TO HARLEM
Chapter 5 - RISING UP IN THE WEST: IDAHO
Chapter 6 - NAILING A FREIGHT ON THE FLY: NEBRASKA
Chapter 7 - POETIC LAND, PUGNACIOUS PEOPLE: CALIFORNIA
Chapter 8 - RAISING THE DEAD IN NEW ORLEANS
Chapter 9 - CIGARS AND TURPENTINE IN FLORIDA
Chapter 10 - AMERICAN AND UN-AMERICAN: BACK AROUND THE BOROUGHS
Chapter 11 - CONVERGING ON WASHINGTON
Chapter 12 - TRAVELING BEYOND
APPENDIX - RESOURCES FOR READERS AND TRAVELERS
SOURCES
CREDITS
INDEX

This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright © 2009 by David A. Taylor. All rights reserved
 
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
 
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
 
Taylor, David A., date.
Soul of a people: the WPA writer’s project uncovers depression America / David Taylor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-0-470-88588-8
1. Federal Writers’ Project—History. 2. United States—Guidebooks—History—20th century. 3. United States—Social conditions—1933-1945. 4. United States—Intellectual life—20th century. 5. United States—Civilization—1918—1945. 6. Federal Writers’ Project—Influence. I. Title.
E175.4.W9T39 2009
973.917__dc22
2008047041
 

 
FOREWORD
By Douglas Brinkley
 
In the late 1970s, when I was in junior high school, my mother gave me a copy of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, a memoir about his journey across America by camper with only his French poodle as companion. The book resonated with me. Every summer our family left Perrysburg, Ohio, in a station wagon pulling a twenty-four-foot Coachman trailer in Steinbeck-like fashion. For six weeks, we visited national parks and literary landmarks while traveling down interstates and blue highways alike. These road trips galvanized my interest in America more than any textbook possibly could have. So my mother quite naturally thought that I would enjoy Travels with Charley, and I did.
An unintended consequence of my first reading of Steinbeck’s 1962 book was that I started to collect WPA guidebooks as a hobby. Early in Travels with Charley, Steinbeck raved about the aesthetic excellence of the WPA guides compiled during the Great Depression. He called them the “most comprehensive account of the United States” ever written. Steinbeck had jammed his suitcase with the American Guides (as they were first known), and he insisted that they were worth their weight in gold. Intrigued by his promotion of these bygone relics, I soon asked my local librarian in Perrysburg to let me study the guidebooks up close. Before long, I was reading about the Oklahoma hills and the Florida flats, Chicago’s Miracle Mile and Pittsburgh’s great steel mills, the Great Smokies and Crater Lake. And the sections of photographs were simply tremendous.
From that moment, I was hooked. As a college student at Ohio State University, I used to scan the shelves of used bookstores and collected the WPA guidebooks as if they were stamps or coins. To date, I own 197 of the volumes, most of them with dust jackets (albeit torn). Everyone who becomes enamored with these volumes has his or her own favorite; mine is the WPA Guide to Illinois . William Least Heat-Moon said he couldn’t have written PrairyErth (a deep map) (1991) without the Nebraska guide. When John Gunther hit the road for his memoir Inside U.S.A. (1947), his suitcase bulged with WPA guides, too. Anybody who takes the time to read a WPA guide (and not merely flip through one) comes away with an understanding that its regional, social, and economic histories were written, in many cases, by stellar prose craftspeople. With no disrespect to the transcendentalists, it’s fair to say that the WPA guides were composed by the most dazzling group of writers America has ever produced.
Now, at long last in Soul of a People , David A. Taylor tells the behind-the-scenes stories of the WPA guides and much more. After rummaging through private and public archives and interviewing WPA veterans, Taylor has written a lively, informative, and often uplifting story of the Federal Writers’ Project. Created in 1935 in the heart of the Great Depression era, the Writers’ Project (part of the Works Progress Administration) at its peak supported more than seventy-five hundred writers, editors, and researchers and received four years of federal financing. When the government funds expired, Congress let the program continue under state sponsorship until 1943. Although people were grateful for even subsistence wages in a time of economic despair, few participants deemed it a badge of honor to earn $20 to $25 a week from the government. But their embarrassment at being on emergency relief work has been our great gain. Many of these young writers went on to create enduring works of American fiction, nonfiction, and oral history.
Taylor takes a different view from most New Deal scholars. For the first time ever, the multiculturalism of the Federal Writers’ Project is explored. As you’ll find in these pages, the Project’s directors believed that the United States could (and should) build a national culture based on diversity. Facing a huge challenge from reactionaries like Martin Dies of Texas, the Ku Klux Klan in several states, and anti-immigration laws that were regularly passed in Washington, D.C., the WPA writers nevertheless forged ahead. They celebrated an astonishing range of often marginalized Americans: Florida turpentine workers, California grape pickers, Nebraska hoboes, and Louisiana folk artists. A roll call of the writers who worked on the WPA guides is a veritable Who’s Who of our finest talent: Conrad Aiken, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Arna Bontemps, Edward Dahlberg, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Kenneth Patchen, Philip Rahv, Kenneth Rexroth, Harold Rosenburg, Studs Terkel, Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, and Frank Yerby.
Reading Soul of a People made me want to hit the used bookstores for some of the volumes I’m missing. The Nevada and Maine state guides, in particular, I desperately covet. As for the city guides, I crave Lexington and the Bluegrass Country and Atlanta: The Capital of the South. They’ll both soon be mine. Put another way, I’m ready for a road trip, and instead of Charley serving as copilot I’ll bring along this wonderful new history by David A. Taylor.
Let the travels begin!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Soul of a People has been a great collaborative effort. I would particularly like to thank Studs Terkel and Stetson Kennedy for their wisdom and generosity. Ann Banks, Christine Bold, Peggy Bulger, Jerrold Hirsch, and Bernard Weisberger showed the way as researchers and historians and provided the documentary team with important insights and guidance. The book and the documentary also owe a debt to the work of Jerre Mangione, Dennis McDaniel, Pamela Bordelon, and William Leuchtenburg.
My thanks to Douglas Brinkley for his enthusiasm for this topic. Louie Attebery, David Bradley, Michael Chabon, Jack Dies, Dena Polacheck Epstein, Dagoberto Gilb, Maryemma Graham, Herb Lewis, Sharon Maust, Gordon McLester, Mindy Morgan, Leo Seltzer, Ruthe Sheffey, and Susan Swetnam answered rounds of questions with good humor. Many more named in the text gave generously of their time and expertise, including the wonderful Grace Paley.
Andrea Kalin has been a supreme partner in making Soul of a People, with her ability to see the path, sharpen the storytelling, and inspire others. Olive Emma Bucklin’s work on the documentary script uncovered valuable new insights. James Mirabello has been an irreplaceable stalwart on this effort for as long as the Writers’ Project itself lasted