77 Down the Road: An Anniversary

Today marks the anniversary of the start of the Federal Writers’ Project (under the WPA) by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935. Several recent items string together to signal the effort’s surprisingly long influence across the years. First, a recent post by NY Bound Books does a wonderful job noting the WPA writers’ influence on how New York life and history get portrayed still.
    Then Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and other books, invokes the WPA writers in her new Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which aims “to force this country’s crisis of poverty and economic insecurity to the center of the national conversation.” Check out her recent thought-provoking interview with Amy Dean.
    Shifting to the individual writers and their lives after the WPA, Richard Wright scholar Jerry Ward, blogging from China about “Richard Wright and 21st-century Questions,” notes how we’re still learning the range of what Wright learned and wrote in his twenties while he was a WPA writer in Chicago and New York.
    Even this week’s New Yorker brings a glimpse of the creative legacy of these writers. In David Remnick’s profile of Bruce Springsteen, the rock star, speaking about writers that have affected him, notes two WPA alumni in the space of two lines: John Cheever, whose WPA editing job helped him survive the Depression, and Saul Bellow, who gained his first job as a writer with the WPA when he was just out of college. “I was a big John Cheever fan, and so when I got into Chekhov I could see where Cheever was coming from,” Springsteen tells Remnick. “And I was a big Philip Roth fan, so I got into Saul Bellow, ‘Augie March.’ These are all new connections for me.”
    Happy to report that you can now watch Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story in full on the Smithsonian Channel online. The filmmaking team is very pleased that this doc, supported with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as six state humanities councils, is now freely available to the public. See America this summer.

Memorial Day Sails

As the U.S. observes Memorial Day, tall ships evoking the Age of Sail visit New York City. My post on National Geographic's travel blog tells of how those ships' crews recall a way of life and and different forms of service.

Steinbeck Festival Honors Voices of Change

... including Woody Guthrie's song, "Deportee." Read more at the Living New Deal:
http://livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu/newsletter/may-2012/#post-1749

Hitting the Road with WPA Audio Tours

In a new twist on the WPA guide tours, Ohio Public Radio has launched a series of downloadable audio tours, following routes mapped out in the 1940 WPA Guide to Ohio. It just started the 23-part series, which will continue through the summer - each week a new tour. Read the whole story here. Then download the series here. Way to go, Ohio.

Modeling the WPA Experience in an Online Game

Filament Games, based in Madison, WI, has been working with Spark Media on a concept for a cross-platform game to put young people in the shoes of the 1930s WPA writers as they went from joblessness to national service, putting American life into a series of  guidebooks. To start, the designers have crafted in Soul of a Place a slice of the WPA experience documenting life along the Lincoln Highway, the interstate precursor to Route 66, as it goes through Pennsylvania. There WPA workers contended with hostile locals, legal threats (one town didn’t like how it was portrayed in the WPA guide and the city council planned a lawsuit) and the difficulties of depicting a massive teapot diner roadside attraction in Bedford, PA.

    Not far to the south of Bedford, incidentally, stood the town of Chaneysville, already a ghost town by the 1930s and later immortalized in David Bradley’s prize-winning novel, The Chaneysville Incident. It tells the story of a black historian in the Bedford area who uses the historical detective tools employed by the WPA writers to uncover an incident involving his father’s death, racial tensions and a deeper mystery.
    In another part of the game prototype, users have the task of assembling a newsreel about the Chicago World’s Fair.
    Stay tuned.

A Chance Find in a Bookstore in Istanbul

Amid the shelves of Simurg Bookstore in the Beyoglu section of Istanbul, Kiran finds the 1939 WPA Guide to New York City with illuminating traces of Muslims' lives and history in America. Read the full post on the Islamicana blog here.

When America Faced the Sea

Thanks to Ken Ackerman, the brains behind Viral History, for letting me post about another era of national crisis, and a new group portrait of everyday Americans doing extraordinary things during the War of 1812. Check out the post featuring Long Islander Joshua Penny here. The new book comes out next week!