In a time of economic uncertainty, the work of the Federal Writers Project provides an incredibly rich collection of voices from the past that remind us of who we are today.
During the Great Depression, when millions of Americans were unemployed, thousands of writers found work through the Federal Writers Project, one of the four arts programs under the Works Progress Administration. Across all 48 states (Hawaii and Alaska were not part of the U.S. yet) writers set out to collect stories from every corner of America. What they intended to produce was a series of state travel guides. Their efforts instead resulted in a national biography, a road map of the United States that refused to shy away from the gritty reality of Depression-era America and to this day remains a celebration of local culture and the American spirit.
A portable recording device in
the trunk of Alan Lomax’s car.
Photographs, writings and audio recordings were among the massive amount of research that told the stories of individual Americans, state-by-state. The state guides launched the careers of some of America’s most timeless authors, and from the small town of Eatonville, Florida, emerged an enduring author who gave voice to the voiceless.
In 1935, with years of anthropological research and a few novels already under her belt, Zora Neale Hurston joined the WPA. A folklorist, anthropologist, novelist, playwright and short story writer, Hurston produced a body of work that evoked African-American culture through the unique voice of its own people. She had a keen ability to listen intently to her subjects, engage in conversation and elicit stories from the heart.
In a time when it was considered a scandal for a black woman to travel with a white man, Hurston traveled throughout the South with American folklorist Alan Lomax to collect folk music for the Library of Congress. Across Florida and the Deep South, Hurston and Lomax traveled with a portable recording device on loan from the Library of Congress. A large burdensome apparatus that traveled in the trunk of a car, the device made it possible to travel to remote places and record sound without electrical sources, enabling Hurston to capture live recordings of American stories that had yet to be told. Neglected and obscure communities told their stories. Former slaves, bent with age, sang old slave spirituals as best as they could recall, and Hurston listened and recorded.
Today the recordings collected for the WPA are still available through the Library of Congress. The weathered recordings movingly portray an African-American culture once on the verge of disappearing from historical archives. Ironically, Hurston herself fell out of favor with literary critics, drifted into obscurity and died penniless and alone. She was laid to rest in an unmarked grave. Rediscovered years later by influential writers, Hurston is today considered one of the pre-eminent writers of 20th century African-American literature. Best known for her 1937 novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Hurston, along with many other notable writers of the WPA, have left behind a treasure trove of American history.
