Republic of detours How the New Deal paid broke writers to rediscover America

Scott Borchert, 1986-

Book - 2021

"A literary history of the Federal Writers Project"--

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

973.917/Borchert
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 973.917/Borchert Checked In
Subjects
Published
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021.
Language
English
Main Author
Scott Borchert, 1986- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
x, 385 pages, 8 pages of unnumbered plates : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [309]-366) and index.
ISBN
9780374298456
  • Prologue
  • Tour 1. Washington, DC
  • Tour 2. Idaho
  • Tour 3. Chicago
  • Tour 4. Florida
  • Tour 5. New York City
  • Tour 6. Washington, DC
  • Epilogue
  • A Note on Sources and Further Reading
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

In his first published book, Borchert, a writer and an editor, has produced an interesting study of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP), focusing on its endeavor to create a series of state and local travel guidebooks by employing out-of-work writers (and aspiring writers) during the Great Depression. Rather than attempt an exhaustive study of the FWP, which has been done elsewhere, Borchert highlights the stories of some noteworthy individuals involved in the project, including Director Henry Alsberg and writers Vardis Fisher, Nelson Algren, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, to describe the effort to secure work for these and other economically struggling writers whose guidebooks avoided simple boosterism, instead contributing lively, sometimes quirky mixtures of local history, travel advice, and social commentary. A chapter is also devoted to Texas congressman Martin Dies Jr. and his successful campaign to financially weaken the project in its later years. This volume is suitable for those interested in reading about the creative ways in which the New Deal provided jobs and the political pressures those seeking to undermine the effort created. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty. --Keith J. Volanto, Collin College

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review

Poet W. H. Auden characterized the Depression Era's Federal Writers' Project as "one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by a state." Borchert's comprehensive history of that project's American Guides series amply bears out Auden's assessment. Determined to give Americans a sense of the nation from one ocean to the other and encourage travel, these guides didn't at all cater to tourists by passing out stars to hotels and restaurants along America's growing highway system. But they did capture a sense of a nation coming to terms with ordinary citizens' needs and aspirations. Designed in part to put authors and editors back to work after the economic crisis caused book printing to plummet, the Project hired great writers and gave them gainful employment. Borchert focuses on a few of the Project's most notable writers. From the Project's DC headquarters, Henry Alsberg struggled to keep far-flung creative souls from expressing their politics or offering little beyond local boosterism. Nelson Algren became a star in the Chicago branch, and Zora Neale Hurston covered Florida and kept Black voices alive in the guides. Borchert's vast research and appreciation of this stellar group shows what government nurturing of artists can accomplish in even the worst of times.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Borchert, a former assistant editor at FSG, debuts with a wide-ranging and deeply researched study of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP), a New Deal program to provide work for unemployed writers. Contending that "all the tensions of American society in the thirties were stuffed into the project's offices," Borchert focuses on a series of state guides produced by the FWP, spotlighting, among other bits of Americana, a municipally owned hydroelectric plant in Idaho, Black storefront churches in Florida, and the arrival of African American migrants from the Deep South in Harlem. The project employed established authors (Zora Neale Hurston) and up-and-comers (Nelson Algren), as well as recent college graduates and out-of-work teachers, and gave shape to Ralph Ellison's literary aspirations and directly inspired Richard Wright's Native Son. Delving deep into the program's day-to-day operations, Borchert describes the difficulties some regional offices had in hiring competent writers, and tensions over whether the goal of the FWP was "simply to provide work or to nurture the creative energies of the people it employed." Though long-winded at times, Borchert's lucid prose brings the FWP and its colorful personalities to life. Literature and history buffs will learn much from this immersive portrait of 1930s America. (June)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

The Federal Writers' Project, a New Deal program to provide work for unemployed writers during the Great Depression, existed for just a few years (1935--43) but left a lasting legacy, which includes the American Guide Series of travel books, and the careers of many notable authors. Borchert has written a fascinating and highly readable history of the quixotic effort to produce travel guides to every American state. He captures the bureaucratic chaos of the project without dwelling on minutiae. Many prominent writers spent time working on the project, but Borchert looks most closely at the contributions of Nelson Algren, Vardis Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright. The chapters on Hurston and Wright are especially interesting; they detail the writers' struggling with segregated spaces within the project, and their efforts to publish accurate depictions of the lives of Black Americans in the 1930s. The book's focus is primarily literary, but it has an undercurrent of politics; many of the authors employed on the project were Communists who drew the scrutiny of Congress several years before the real start of the Red Scare. VERDICT This fascinating and enjoyable volume is recommended for all readers interested in American literary history.--Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A fresh history of the "unlikely birth, tumultuous life, and ignoble death" of the Federal Writers' Project (1935-1943). The FWP, a division of the Works Progress Administration, was a work relief program that also served as a literary endeavor. Borchert chronicles the production of the FWP's series of American Guides to all 48 states by fleshing out key figures: Henry Alsberg, the director and "crucial visionary"; Vardis Fisher, Idaho novelist and director of that state's guidebook; Nelson Algren, field worker for the Illinois project; Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote for the Florida guide; Richard Wright, who worked on Harlem guide material; and Martin Dies Jr., Democratic Congressman from Texas who battled Alsberg over federal funding of the FWP and Federal Theater Project. Alsberg intended his series of regional guides to be a "vast national self-portrait assembled by thousands of destitute citizens," treating writing as a craft--i.e., a form of labor requiring a stimulus package. Fisher, "a gleeful iconoclast from out of the American West" and "elegist for the pioneer experience," wrote all of his state's guide himself. Algren's goals for a "proletarian literature" found a "purposeful citizenship" in his reporting from the field, "churning out the raw material that formed the basis of the American Guides and all other FWP projects." Borchert, a diligent researcher, makes a convincing case for the significance of Hurston, Algren, and Fisher as writers "whose talents would have been wasted by the Depression" and Wright as one "whose talent may have never been known at all." Though other celebrated writers worked for the FWP--Studs Terkel, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Ralph Ellison--Alsberg was clear in his intent that the FWP was open to all writers, including "near writers" and "occasional writers." Borchert provides interesting, detailed portraits of FWP life and how office politics and pressure from the left (strikes) and right (redbaiting, threats of defunding) jeopardized the endeavor. A well-documented, engaging history of a program that treated writers as valuable citizens. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.