Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30)
Scott Borchert’s history of the Depressionera Federal Writers’ Project is “much more than a nostalgic road trip,” said Maureen Corrigan in NPR.org. The program, established in 1935, created roughly 4,500 jobs for out-of-work pencil pushers and produced meaty and memorable guides to each of America’s then 48 states. But while Borchert’s account of the project “teems with colorful characters and telling anecdotes,” his book is most useful for highlighting a moment when an ideologically diverse and geographically scattered group of people united to tell a story about America that celebrated the nation’s multitudinous nature and pushed back against the Eurocentric tale favored by the era’s white nativists. “That tug-of-war between two visions of America, as Borchert recognizes, has only intensified today.”
“Embracing creative types in 1935 was not straightforward,” said Max Holleran in The New Republic. With families lined up at urban soup kitchens and others starving on Dust Bowl farms, writers weren’t many policymakers’ first priority. But of the 3 million jobs created by the Works Progress Administration, the 4,500 in the Federal Writers’ Project, or FWP, weren’t many, and the program at least demonstrated a recognition of the value of knowledge workers and their skills. Various greats drew paychecks from the program, including Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, and John Cheever. Richard Wright