Introduction: A Literary Venture, Sidestepped

Abstract

The Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) set out to influence the course of American literature. Federal writers, many of whom would become famous in the postwar era, collected oral histories, folklore, and ethnographies that served as raw material for their own writing. Yet studies of the FWP have been almost exclusively undertaken not by literary scholars but by cultural historians who have perceived its unique place in Depression-era history. This introductory chapter chronicles the FWP’s mission to influence the course of American literature and then cites three reasons why the Project has long eluded literary criticism: its influence on later writing is diffuse and difficult to identify; its documentary form is often associated solely with 1930s’ social realism; and its role as a bureaucratic arm of the New Deal has precluded it from being recognized as an agent in the creative process.

The contribution of the Program to American literature can only be measured in years to come when future readers and researchers will have the picturization of American life obtained and delivered first hand by the thousands of workers who were given useful employment in an enterprise attempted in the face of the emergencies of appalling proportions. Likewise private industry has been stimulated and aided by the Writers’ Program since the publishing industry, with millions invested, has been provided, during the 1930’s and ‘40’s, with hundreds of books which otherwise would have remained unwritten. The cooperation of communities, sponsors, and thousands of anonymous workers has produced social benefits as well as a lasting heritage in American literature.

—Internal Memo, 1942 (FWP, “Objectives”)