User:JF904806/Federal Writers' Project

The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was a federal government project in the United States created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers and many others during the Great Depression. It was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program. It was one of a group of New Deal arts programs known collectively as Federal Project Number One or Federal One. The FWP employed thousands of people and produced hundreds of publications, including state guides, city guides, local histories, oral histories, ethnographies, and children's books. In addition to writers, the project provided jobs to unemployed librarians, clerks, researchers, editors, and historians.

Background
Funded under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, the FWP was established on July 27, 1935, by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Henry Alsberg, a journalist, playwright, theatrical producer, and human-rights activist, directed the program from 1935 to 1939. In 1939, Alsberg was fired, federal funding was cut, and the project fell under state sponsorship led by John D. Newsom. The FWP ended completely in 1943.

At its peak, the Federal Writers' Project employed approximately 6,500 men and women around the country paying them about $20 a week. It is believed an estimated 10,000 people found employment throughout the span of the FWP. The project set out not only to provide work relief for unemployed writers, but also to create a unique "self-portrait of America" through publication of guidebooks. From 1935 to 1943, the project cost about $27,000,000 – 0.002% of all WPA appropriations.

American Guide Series and other publications
See main article: American Guide Series

The American Guide Series, the most well-known of the FWP's publications, consisted of guides to the then 48 states, as well as the Alaska Territory, Puerto Rico, and Washington, DC. The books were written and compiled by writers from individual states and territories, and edited by Alsberg and his staff in Washington, DC. The format was generally uniform, and each guide included detailed histories of the state or territory, with descriptions of every city and town, automobile travel routes, photographs, maps, and chapters on natural resources, culture, and geography. The inclusion of essays about the various cultures of people living in the states, including immigrants and African Americans, was unprecedented. City books, such as The New York City Guide, were also published as part of the series. As government produced publications, the guides are in the public domain and many are available online at the Internet Archive. The FWP also published another series, Life In America, and numerous individual titles. Many FWP books were bestsellers. Others, such as Cape Cod Pilot, written by author Josef Berger using the pseudonym Jeremiah Digges, received critical acclaim.

In each state formed a Writers' Project non-relief staff of editors, with a much larger group of field workers drawn from local unemployment rolls. The people hired came from a variety of backgrounds, ranging from former newspaper workers to white-collar and blue-collar workers without writing or editing experience.

Slave Narrative Collection
Main Article: Slave Narrative Collection

Notable projects of the FWP included the Slave Narrative Collection, a set of interviews that culminated in over 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. Many of these narratives are available online from the above-named collection at the Library of Congress website. Folklorist Benjamin A. Botkin was instrumental in insuring the survival of these manuscripts. Among the many researchers and authors who have used this collection are Colson Whitehead for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Underground Railroad.

Life History and Folklore Projects
Other programs that emerged from Alsberg's desire to create an inclusive "self-portrait of America" were the Life History and Folklore projects. These consisted of first-person narratives and interviews collected and conducted by FWP workers, which documented the traditions and everyday practices of people of various ethnicities, regions, and occupations. The Library of Congress has a collection of life histories that consists of approximately 2,900 documents, compiled and transcribed by more than 300 writers from 24 states. According to the Library of Congress website, American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1940, the documents "chronicle vivid life stories of Americans who lived at the turn of the century and include tales of meeting Billy the Kid, surviving the 1871 Chicago fire, pioneer journeys out West, grueling factory work, and the immigrant experience. Writers hired by this Depression-era work project included Ralph Ellison, Nelson Algren, May Swenson, and many others." [add citation]

==== Illinois Writers' Project [this does not seem like the best title for this subsection since it is about several notable African American writers. How about "African American Writers" or something similar? ==== The Illinois Writers' Project, represented one of the few racially integrated project sites. The Chicago project employed Arna Bontemps, an established voice of the Harlem Renaissance, and helped to launch the literary careers of African-American writers such as Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Katherine Dunham, and Frank Yerby. The Virginia Negro Studies Project employed 16 African American writers and culminated in the publication of The Negro in Virginia (1940).  Notably, it included photographs by Robert McNeill, now remembered as a groundbreaking African American photographer. The unpublished works of African American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who was employed by the Florida Writers' Project, was compiled years after her death in Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers' Project.

America Eats
A short lived project of the FWP was the America Eats project, which was a proposed book of the regional foodways of the United States. Each state was tasked with gathering information about foods and food-related events unique to their area, and subsequently preparing essays. The country was divided into five regions: the Northeast, the South, the Middle West, the Far West, and the Southwest. While materials, in various quantities, were gathered from all five regions, the book America Eats! was never completed and published due to the entry of the United States into World War II and the subsequent loss of funding for the FWP and its projects. Materials from the America Eats project are held in various archives and libraries around the country, including at the Library of Congress and the Montana State University Archives and Special Collections. Michigan State University has also created a digital companion project to the 1930s initiative also called What America Ate.

Proposal for a New Federal Writers' Project
In the wake of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and consequent global economic disruption, several writers and politicians called for a new U.S. Federal Writers’ Project. In May 2021, on the anniversary of the original project, Congressman Ted Lieu and Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernandez introduced legislation to create a new FWP, administered by the Department of Labor, that would hire unemployed and underemployed writers. Supporters of the legislation included James Fallows, Ruth Dickey, and Jonathan Lethem. The new program would empower the Department of Labor to distribute $60 million in grants to a variety of recipients, from academic institutions to nonprofit literary organizations, newsrooms, libraries, and communications unions and guilds. These grantees would then hire a new corps of unemployed and underemployed writers who, like their New Deal forebears, would then fan out into towns, cities, and countryside to observe the shape of American life. They would assemble a collective, national self-portrait, with an emphasis on the impact many have felt from the pandemic. The material they gathered would then be housed in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. A new Federal Writers' Project would be an economic rescue plan to help many that have been struggling since even before the Pandemic.