Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America - Hardcover

by David A. Taylor (Author)

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.

Front Jacket

In the wake of the Crash of 1929, companies fired an average of 20,000 workers every day; in some cities over half the adult population was unemployed. The story of writers rescued from joblessness by the Federal Writers' Project is as much the compelling drama of people caught when a soaring economy suddenly crashes as it is the fascinating account of some of America's best writers--before they were famous--turned loose on the landscape with a government mandate to "hold up a mirror to America."

John Cheever was a high school dropout living on raisins and buttermilk when he got a job with the Writers' Project. Richard Wright, 28 with a seventh-grade education and a passion for books, was digging ditches and cleaning hospital operating rooms. Anzia Yezierska had already ridden the American dream all the way up and then back down--from poor immigrant to bestselling author and Hollywood screenwriter to sharing a cramped place and looking for work.

In 1935, the federal government's WPA Writers' Project offered a lifeline: it hired unemployed writers to document life in America for a series of state travel guides. The WPA writers walked streets, interviewed passersby, described urban landmarks and rural landscapes, chatted about nightclubs and bars, recorded folklore and folk music, and compiled what is now very precious information about how Americans lived and how America looked. With striking images, firsthand accounts, and new discoveries from personal collections and other sources, David Taylor's "Soul of a People" brings it all to vibrant and unruly life: the writers, their friendships, the hardships, the political battles, and the enduring outcome.

The book follows Richard Wright from his WPA job in Chicago to New York, where he sits elbow to elbow with John Cheever in the WPA cafeteria and recruits a "smart young man and sharp dresser" named Ralph Ellison to start documenting the scene in Harlem. You'll see Florida's Gulf Coast through the eyes of Zora Neale Hurston, and oil-flush Oklahoma City through the eyes of Jim Thompson, who one day lost patience with a younger Project writer, Louis LaMoore. "The biggest fraud in the world," Thompson complained to a coworker about LaMoore, who had not yet become Louis L'Amour, one of the bestselling authors of Western novels of all time. You'll find out what happened after Studs Terkel dropped out of law school into the worst job market in history and meet a young Kenneth Rexroth climbing Mount Shasta in California--decades before he introduced Allen Ginsberg's Howl and helped launch the Beat Generation.

From Nobel Prize winners to barroom brawlers, "Soul of a People" traces lives drawn together in surprising ways and beautifully captures the voices and spirit of America's past--and the profound effect of those voices on our modern culture.

Back Jacket

advance praise for soul of a people

"A wonderful and engaging book . . . David Taylor's "Soul of a People" will make you secretly wish that you could have been one of the thousands of writers who, during the height of the Depression, set out to paint an intimate portrait of a nation and its people. Taylor illuminates this history of the Federal Writers' Project with impressive research and deft storytelling."
--Robert Whitaker, author of On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation

"During the Great Depression, the federal government paid out-of-work writers to capture American voices on paper. But "Soul of a People" is the first book to tell the stories of the Federal Writers themselves. In David Taylor's engaging narrative, this spunky, colorful, and entertaining crew comes back to life."
--Ann Banks, editor of First Person America, an anthology of oral histories collected by the Federal Writers' Project

"This intimate portrait of the Writers' Project, a gem of FDR's New Deal, is a nostalgic journey through America in the Depression Era. Familiar faces dot every corner, young writers from Studs Terkel to Richard Wright, John Cheever to Ralph Ellison. It's a journey well worth taking, a key formative moment in our literary common culture, well written and nicely researched."
--Kenneth D. Ackerman, author of Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties

"Long before Oprah and blogs, the WPA during the Great Depression of the 1930s gave America its first mass exercise in reading and writing--the Federal Writers' Project. Now David Taylor goes inside the project to give us intimate snapshots of the writers and what they saw and felt during that hard time. "Soul of a People" is a revealing and valuable resource."
--Nick Taylor, author of American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA

"David Taylor has added a perfect chapter to the amazing saga of the Federal Writers' Project, with vivid portraits of some of the men and women who produced the American Guide series, an unmatched collective portrait of a people battered but not beaten by the Great Depression. "Soul of a People" should be mandatory reading as the storm clouds of hard times hover over us again."
--Bernard Weisberger, editor of The WPA Guide to America

Author Biography

David A. Taylor wrote the article for "Smithsonian" that is the basis for this book and the Smithsonian/Channel HD special of the same title. He writes for the "Washington Post," the "Village Voice," and other publications, as well as scripts for television documentaries. His work has aired on the Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, and elsewhere. He is the author of the award-winning book "Ginseng: The Divine Root" and a book of fiction, "Success: Stories." Visit www.davidataylor.com.