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

David A. Taylor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0470403802 | ISBN-13: 978-0470403808 | Edition: 1st

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Wisely draws on a wide variety of material from the skilled writers ... Taylor's version is important as the place to start learning about that remarkable era." --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Best Books of 2009

"An excellent history" --Washington City Paper

"With accessible prose, a wealth of detail and vintage photos, Taylor recounts the project and some of the writers who benefited from it -- and who benefited the nation with what they produced." --Richmond Times-Dispatch

"A nice way to take a slice of biography... A good literary biography." --The Book Doctors, KCUR

"Taylor's book takes us back to the Depression days of the 1930s and reminds us that the state guides are still in use today." --Lincoln Journal Star

From the Inside Flap

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1st edition (February 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470403802
• ISBN-13: 978-0470403808
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #523,900 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

My books have ranked among Best Books of the Year and have been finalists for the Library of Virginia's People's Choice Award and others. My nonfiction appears in Smithsonian, The Washington Post, Oxford American, The American Scholar and Science. My short stories won the 2008 Washington Writers' Publishing House fiction prize and appear in various anthologies. I have written and co-produced documentary films for National Geographic and the Smithsonian Channel, including the film of Soul of a People: Writing America's Story, which was nominated for a 2010 Writer's Guild Award. I teach at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

After high school I took a summer job at a military base, running computer programs that I didn't understand, using sonar to map tunnels half a world away where North Korea was digging under the Demilitarized Zone to South Korea. Some days I went along to test sonar recorders. Out in a field, I would twist a detonator -- not the push-down motion you see in old cartoons -- and set off explosive charges of C4. (Years later I gave that job to a character in a short story.) The experience showed me that the world is full of stories and unlikely connections, from Asia to American suburbia. I'm drawn to stories, both in fact and fiction, that capture that strange quality of life. www.davidataylor.org

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book! March 3, 2009

By B. ROTHMAN

Format:Hardcover

I just loved this book! It is meticulously researched and beautifully written. For me, it has brought to life a period in this country's history that has enormous relevance to the difficult times in which we now live. I am not a historian, but I was fascinated by the story of the Federal Writers Project and Taylor's wonderful portraits of the writers who were offered a life line by the Project. The fabulous Depression-era photographs chosen to accompany the text were a perfect visual plus. Mr. Taylor is a terrific storyteller; I highly recommend this book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great writing about a fascinating writing project. February 11, 2010

By Craig Matteson HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

When miracles occur one of the natural responses is to try and recreate them. What was it about 18th Century Vienna that produced Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and hundreds of other worthy composers? Even if you could figure it out, there is no way to pull all the elements together again in the real world. Just like the little flower that finds its way through a crack in the pavement to give life and beauty, however briefly, in a barren and hostile place, we should notice, wonder, and be grateful it happened at all.

In my view, this book from David Taylor is a little miracle about a bigger miracle. How many of us know about the WPA writers' project? How many know about the city guides they produced all over the country? Or the famous writers who were part of that project? Those city guides are collector's items now and widely admired not only for their historical value, but also for the marvelous writing and creativity and down right quirkiness so many of them have.

The FDR administration was throwing lots of money at lots of different things in an effort to find ways to help people who were without help. There was no social safety net. There was no bureaucracy in place to get in the way of fast action or creative approaches. Yes, there was criticism and a great deal of money was wasted, in the sense that people were paid and allowed to continue eating without actually successfully producing much. But a great deal was produced.

Today, there would be volumes describing what each standardized city guide must include and more volumes on style and acceptable language. Stultifying rules would require that the writers be more factory workers cranking out little sausage-link words rather than personal expressions of a city, its history, environs, and how people live there. While the modern guides might be wonderfully standardized they would hardly be wonderful reading.

That Taylor was willing and able to put this history down for us and give us such interesting information on writers like Cheever, Richard Wright, Anzia Yezierska, Ralph Ellison and many others is just a wonder. Taylor also has an eye for the telling detail and a writing style that invites us to turn the page and find out what is happening next. If you read a lot of non-fiction as I do, you know what a delightful talent that is.

Taylor includes many well chosen photographs that enliven the text and help us see the period in question in ways that allow us to imagine the text in richer context.

I urge you to read this book not just as a history of the city guides, but as a telling example of what was going on in the New Deal that isn't going on today in our current economic crisis. Sometimes safety nets bind as much as they save.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding! June 7, 2009

By Lance S.

Format:Hardcover

I was unaware of this book until I had the good fortune of hearing Mr. Taylor read from his book at a local bookstore. He's a wonderful personality and the excepts were fascinating. So I got the book and have been throughly enjoying it. It's a vibrant account of a little known but important aspect of the WPA, and I've enjoyed learning more about it. I look forward to reading the rest of Mr. Taylor's work. He's one to watch.