Showing posts with label writers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writers. Show all posts

Sunday, June 13, 2021

Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America by Scott Borchert

It was a roiling and seething experiment, and even its participants could not agree on what it all meant. ~from Republic of Detours by Scott Borchert


During the Depression, President Roosevelt's New Deal relief programs paid millions of people to work. White collar workers were also starving, including writers, editors, newspapermen, and college professors. The Federal Writers Project (FWP) was created to employ tens of thousands of writers across America; it is credited for preventing suicide rates among writers. The program not only printed over a thousand publications, it boosted the careers of the 20th c most iconic writers.

The FWP conceived of a series of American Guides, filled with a broad range of information, including geography, politics, history, folklore, and ethnographic and cultural studies. They were the ultimate travel guides, providing tours and destinations that were often known only to local people. 

Author Scott Borchert's uncle had hundreds of the guides and he became curious to know who created them and why. "They carry a whiff of New Deal optimism," he writes, but they also managed to sidestep "those signature American habits of boosterism and aggressive national mythologizing." The Guides offer insight into how Americans saw themselves and their history.

Borchert uncovered how the massive program was rife with conflict and struggles. The state programs submitted articles to the D. C. editors. Conflicts arose. For instance, there was a backlash against the term Civil War by Southern states who wanted War Between the States. 

Readers learn about the life, careers, and politics of the administrators and writers. In the 1930s, socialism was embraced by progressives, and many of the Guide writers were progressives who wrote about labor and attacked racial and economic inequity. Eventually, the program came under attack as a communist vehicle.

Tour One introduces Henry Alsberg, friend of Emma Goldman, selected to run the WPA in Washington DC. His first mission was to "take 3.5 million people off relief and put them to work." The quality of the work was unimportant. And yet, the largest publishing houses later testified to the quality of the guides.

Tour Two considers how the program worked in Idaho under Vardis Fisher who completed and published the first Guide. Tour Three takes us to Chicago where writers Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, Frank Yerby, and Richard Wright were hired.

Tour Four goes to Florida where anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston joined a Negro Unit to write The Florida Negro. Tour Five goes to New York City, the most dysfunctional unit. Richard Wright left the FWP in Chicago, where he became friends with Margaret Walker, for New York City where he meet Ralph Ellison.

Tour Six returns to DC, the WPA attacked by Rep. Martin Dies, Jr., who contended that the organization was a stronghold of communists intending to create a propaganda outlet.

This is a broad ranging history of an era, the program, and the people who ran and worked in it, and its legacy. The Guides legacy includes inspiring authors John Steinbeck and William Least Heat-Moon.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through Net Galley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Read an excerpt from Republic of Detours at 

Read some of the guides at

Read some of the manuscripts
https://www.loc.gov/collections/federal-writers-project/about-this-collection/

Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America
by Scott Borchert
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub Date June 15, 2021   
ISBN: 9780374298456
hardcover $30.00 (USD)

from the publisher
An immersive account of the New Deal project that created state-by-state guidebooks to America, in the midst of the Great Depression—and employed some of the biggest names in American letters

The plan was as idealistic as it was audacious—and utterly unprecedented. Take thousands of broke writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a rich and beguiling series of guidebooks to the forty-eight states. There would be hundreds of other publications dedicated to cities, regions, and towns, plus voluminous collections of folklore, ex-slave narratives, and even recipes, all of varying quality, each revealing distinct sensibilities.

All this fell within the singular purview of the Federal Writers’ Project—a division of the Works Progress Administration founded to employ jobless writers, from bestselling novelists and acclaimed poets to the more dubiously qualified. 
It was a predictably eclectic organization, directed by an equally eccentric man, Henry Alsberg—a disheveled Manhattanite and “philosophical anarchist” who was prone to fits of melancholy as well as bursts of inspiration. Under Alsberg’s direction, the FWP took up the lofty goal of rediscovering America, and soon found itself embroiled in the day’s most heated arguments regarding literary representation, radical politics, and racial inclusion—forcing it to reckon with the promises and failures of both the New Deal and the American experiment itself.

Scott Borchert’s Republic of Detours tells the story of this raucous and remarkable undertaking by delving into the stories of several key figures and tracing the FWP from its optimistic early days to its dismemberment by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Along with Alsberg and a cast of New Dealers, we meet Vardis Fisher, the cantankerous Western novelist whose presence on the project proved to be a blessing and a curse; Nelson Algren, broke and smarting from the failure of his first novel, whose job saved him from a potentially grim fate; Zora Neale Hurston, the most published Black woman in the country, whose talents were sought by the FWP’s formally segregated Florida office; and Richard Wright, who arrived in the chaotic New York City office on an upward career trajectory, courtesy of the WPA. Meanwhile, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, John Cheever, and many other future literary stars found sustenance when they needed it.

By way of these and a multitude of other stories, Borchert illuminates an essentially noble enterprise that sought to create a broad, inclusive, and collective self-portrait of America at a time when the nation’s very identity and future were thrown into question. As the United States enters a new era of economic distress, political strife, and culture-industry turmoil, this book’s lessons are urgent and strong.

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold Wary by Duncan White


Duncan White's Cold Warriors is an engrossing history of the writers who wielded their pen for political ends and how their governments promoted or silenced them during the Cold War. 

The war was a conflict of ideas and books were used as weapons to attack political ideologies by writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Some authors were spies while others unknowingly worked for CIA-funded publications. Writers resistant to government policy and programs were silenced, punished, imprisoned or killed. 

Dense with information, the book has the impetus of a thriller filled with shocking twists and multilayered characters. The story begins with the Spanish Civil War and the disenchantment of George Orwell, spurring him to write his greatest novels. White follows the Cold Was to the end of the Berlin Wall, Glasnost, and the Prague Spring with stories like that of the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel who was found guilty of subversion and imprisoned yet became president.

I grew up seeing these writer's names on the bookshelves at the stores where I spent my allowance on paperbacks. I had no idea of their political stance or that some were spies!
  • George Orwell, whose Animal Farm I bought and read as a teen 
  • Arthur Koestler, whose Darkness at Noon I had erringly thought was a science fiction book 
  • Boris Pasternak, whose Dr. Zhivago I read after seeing the movie
  •  Alexander Solzhenitsyn's books were published when I was a young adult and at one time I owned all his books in hardcover 
  • Graham Greene I thought was a Catholic Writer.
  • Mary McCarthy's The Group was a best seller
  •  Stephen Spender, who signed my copy of his book of selected poems at a poetry reading
  • John le Carre, pen name of David Cornwall, an M16 spy whose fictionalized spy-talk became adopted in real life
Plus
  • Andrei Sinyavsky
  • Richard Wright
  • Ernest Hemingway 
  • Gioconda Belli
  • Vaclav Havel,
  • Joan Didion
  • Isaac Babel
  • Howard Fast
  • Lillian Hellman 
  • Mikhail Sholokhov
Duncan concludes that the battle between Communism and Capitalism has morphed into a war between forms of democracy and authoritarianism and populist nationalism. 

Today's writers still resist and condemn and create bring visions of the kind of country and world we must become to flourish and, very possibly, to survive. One lesson I learned from this book is that regardless of how I personally feel about a writer's ideas, the rights of freedom of speech and a free press is precious and integral to the preservation of a free society.
quilt by Nancy A. Bekofske

I was given access to a free egalley by the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Cold Warriors
by Duncan White
Custom House
On Sale: 08/27/2019
List Price: 32.50 USD
ISBN: 9780062449818
ISBN 10: 0062449818