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REPUBLIC OF DETOURS by Scott Borchert

REPUBLIC OF DETOURS

How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers To Rediscover America

by Scott Borchert

Pub Date: June 15th, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-29845-6
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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.