Soul of a People  

During the Great Depression, millions of unemployed men and women looked to the government for a life raft. Hundreds of thousands found jobs within the Works Progress Administration (WPA), most wielding picks and shovels to build roads and schools. For a smaller cadre, however, the tools were little more than pen, paper, and the spirit of investigation. The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was one of four arts programs under the WPA, which fed thousands of unemployed writers and "would-be" writers, assigning them to document America in guidebooks and interviews. Writers' Project writers included a handful of published authors and a diverse, energetic goulash of old newspaper hands, former schoolteachers, typists, high school dropouts, bohemians, and other struggling people. None earned more than $100 a month.

A number of writers who toiled in the FWP offices around the country later became prominent in the nation’s literary landscapes. Among the authors who got their start in the Writers’ Project  were Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston (pictured at right, courtesy of the Library of Congress), Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, Studs Terkel, and Nelson Algren. Some went on to win National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize; others established a foundation for successful writing careers in many different genres.

Probably the most widely known achievements of the Federal Writers’ Project were the travel guides created for every state -- the famous “American Guides” series. Linebaugh Library has several of these guides currently on display in the Historical Research Room. Tennessee: A Guide to the State was published in 1939. This book includes history and cultural information about the state, as well as guided tours of places to visit along the state's major highways (with several interesting stories woven in). The Murfreesboro Post has published an excerpt from this guide, featuring a tour of US Hwy 41 from Nashville through Smyrna, Murfreesboro, and Manchester; a tour along US 231 from Murfreesboro through Bell Buckle and Shelbyville; and a snippet of the tour along US 70A through Crossville.

WPA writers also collected folklore, compiled guides for distinctive cultural regions in the U.S., interviewed former slaves, and recorded the life histories of citizens all across America. A number of those interviews can be found at the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project website, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html.

In Tennessee, the FWP collected regional folktales which were published in the book God Bless the Devil! Liars' Bench Tales. A selection of these stories will be shared during our folktales program on June 9. Materials were collected for other books, but these were never published as the FWP was disbanded in 1939. A selection of the documents produced by the Tennessee Writers' Project is on display at Linebaugh Library. 

Although there was some opposition to the work of the Writers’ Project during the 1930s, it is slowly coming back into public view as a new generation of readers and researchers discover its historical riches and its glimpse into a tumultuous and fascinating era of American culture.