Republic of Detours

March 29, 2021
Borchert, a former assistant editor at FSG, debuts with a wide-ranging and deeply researched study of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a New Deal program to provide work for unemployed writers. Contending that “all the tensions of American society in the thirties were stuffed into the project’s offices,” Borchert focuses on a series of state guides produced by the FWP, spotlighting, among other bits of Americana, a municipally owned hydroelectric plant in Idaho, Black storefront churches in Florida, and the arrival of African American migrants from the Deep South in Harlem. The project employed established authors (Zora Neale Hurston) and up-and-comers (Nelson Algren), as well as recent college graduates and out-of-work teachers, and gave shape to Ralph Ellison’s literary aspirations and directly inspired Richard Wright’s Native Son. Delving deep into the program’s day-to-day operations, Borchert describes the difficulties some regional offices had in hiring competent writers, and tensions over whether the goal of the FWP was “simply to provide work or to nurture the creative energies of the people it employed.” Though long-winded at times, Borchert’s lucid prose brings the FWP and its colorful personalities to life. Literature and history buffs will learn much from this immersive portrait of 1930s America.

May 1, 2021

The Federal Writers' Project, a New Deal program to provide work for unemployed writers during the Great Depression, existed for just a few years (1935-43) but left a lasting legacy, which includes the American Guide Series of travel books, and the careers of many notable authors. Borchert has written a fascinating and highly readable history of the quixotic effort to produce travel guides to every American state. He captures the bureaucratic chaos of the project without dwelling on minutiae. Many prominent writers spent time working on the project, but Borchert looks most closely at the contributions of Nelson Algren, Vardis Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright. The chapters on Hurston and Wright are especially interesting; they detail the writers' struggling with segregated spaces within the project, and their efforts to publish accurate depictions of the lives of Black Americans in the 1930s. The book's focus is primarily literary, but it has an undercurrent of politics; many of the authors employed on the project were Communists who drew the scrutiny of Congress several years before the real start of the Red Scare. VERDICT This fascinating and enjoyable volume is recommended for all readers interested in American literary history.--Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2021
A fresh history of the "unlikely birth, tumultuous life, and ignoble death" of the Federal Writers' Project (1935-1943). The FWP, a division of the Works Progress Administration, was a work relief program that also served as a literary endeavor. Borchert chronicles the production of the FWP's series of American Guides to all 48 states by fleshing out key figures: Henry Alsberg, the director and "crucial visionary"; Vardis Fisher, Idaho novelist and director of that state's guidebook; Nelson Algren, field worker for the Illinois project; Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote for the Florida guide; Richard Wright, who worked on Harlem guide material; and Martin Dies Jr., Democratic Congressman from Texas who battled Alsberg over federal funding of the FWP and Federal Theater Project. Alsberg intended his series of regional guides to be a "vast national self-portrait assembled by thousands of destitute citizens," treating writing as a craft--i.e., a form of labor requiring a stimulus package. Fisher, "a gleeful iconoclast from out of the American West" and "elegist for the pioneer experience," wrote all of his state's guide himself. Algren's goals for a "proletarian literature" found a "purposeful citizenship" in his reporting from the field, "churning out the raw material that formed the basis of the American Guides and all other FWP projects." Borchert, a diligent researcher, makes a convincing case for the significance of Hurston, Algren, and Fisher as writers "whose talents would have been wasted by the Depression" and Wright as one "whose talent may have never been known at all." Though other celebrated writers worked for the FWP--Studs Terkel, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Ralph Ellison--Alsberg was clear in his intent that the FWP was open to all writers, including "near writers" and "occasional writers." Borchert provides interesting, detailed portraits of FWP life and how office politics and pressure from the left (strikes) and right (redbaiting, threats of defunding) jeopardized the endeavor. A well-documented, engaging history of a program that treated writers as valuable citizens.

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Starred review from March 15, 2021
Poet W. H. Auden characterized the Depression Era's Federal Writers' Project as "one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by a state." Borchert's comprehensive history of that project's American Guides series amply bears out Auden's assessment. Determined to give Americans a sense of the nation from one ocean to the other and encourage travel, these guides didn't at all cater to tourists by passing out stars to hotels and restaurants along America's growing highway system. But they did capture a sense of a nation coming to terms with ordinary citizens' needs and aspirations. Designed in part to put authors and editors back to work after the economic crisis caused book printing to plummet, the Project hired great writers and gave them gainful employment. Borchert focuses on a few of the Project's most notable writers. From the Project's DC headquarters, Henry Alsberg struggled to keep far-flung creative souls from expressing their politics or offering little beyond local boosterism. Nelson Algren became a star in the Chicago branch, and Zora Neale Hurston covered Florida and kept Black voices alive in the guides. Borchert's vast research and appreciation of this stellar group shows what government nurturing of artists can accomplish in even the worst of times.

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