Republic of Detours PDF
Preview Republic of Detours
The incredible story of a WPA program that set out to create a state-by-state guidebook to America—and employed some of the biggest names in American letters.
The plan was as idealistic as it was audacious—and perhaps flat-out crazy. Take thousands of broke writers—whether formally unemployed or self-anointed, communists or non-conformists, urbanites or country dwellers, young or old, poets or reporters, but all of them American in some shape or form—and put them to work writing a guidebook to a country in the throes of the Great Depression. Or forty-eight guides to be exact, one for each state, along with hundreds of miscellaneous books dedicated to cities, territories, folklore, and even slave narratives, all of varying quality, each revealing distinct regional sensibilities.
All this fell within the singular purview of the Federal Writer's Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration founded to employ not just writers but...
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