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Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America David A. Taylor Wiley, 2009 272 pp. Cloth $27.95 Reviewed by Robert Hunt Ferguson, Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, currently researching cooperative farming in the rural South from the Great Depression to the Civil Rights Movement. At the height of the New Deal, the Works Progress Administration (wpa) began an ambitious effort to put writers to work recording the lives of everyday Americans. The wpa Writers' Project employed thousands of writers who traveled the country with tape recorders and notepads, recording folktales, music, and life histories. The most anticipated assignment of the project was the American Guide Series that promoted driving tours of every state, highlighting local color and outof-the-way attractions. The guides informed and inspired the work of later authors from William Least Heat-Moon to Michael Chabon. John Steinbeck pored over the wpa state guides while researching The Grapes of Wrath, and with a camper full of canned goods and state guides, Steinbeck and his French Poodle circumnavigated the lower forty-eight in the early 1960s, chronicled in Travels with Charley. In Soul of a People: The WPA Writers'
Southern Cultures – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Nov 7, 2010
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