38. The American Guide Series

KIM: Hey, everybody, welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes. It’s almost officially summer and we’re so lucky here in the States that people are getting vaccinated and ready to explore the world again. (Maybe not the world, but at least maybe the country.) Kim, do you have any interesting travel plans for the summer?

KIM: Not yet for summer, though I’m dreaming about some local trips. In September, we are probably going to Hawaii, and I’m very excited about going to the beach.

AMY: That sounds so amazing. I’ve been thinking of Hawaii a lot through the whole pandemic — just to be able to sit with a drink in your hand … Yeah, the sunset and a Mai Tai. You earned it this year.

KIM: Thank you. I feel like I have… we all have, we all have. What about you, Amy?

AMY: Yeah, I've got some getaways planned — mostly places within the state of California, though we are going to fly to Ohio to see my family for the first time in two years. So that will be fun. Um, speaking of travel, though, do you enjoy reading travel guides?

KIM: Yeah, actually, I do. Well, I don’t know so much about reading them. I usually order those BK eyewitness guides before I travel anywhere new. I really liked the pictures. It gives me a feel for if I want to go to a particular place. But I love literary travel guides. I have this beautiful little book called Florence A Delicate Case. It's basically essays by an American who lived in Florence for many years, and he had all these really great experiences there. And also, I usually try to read a fictional book set there on the flight or while I'm there I once read Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety while I traveled around the south of France. It's actually set in Paris during the French Revolution, of course, so it's a bit tangential to the south of France, but it's still really great and also a lot to lug around, both emotionally, mentally, and physically, on that trip.

AMY: That’s so like you, carrying this big tome. Yeah, I'm kind of similar.  Before I go somewhere new, I like to not necessarily read travel guides, but you know, I want to know the cool history. I want to know the interesting anecdotes, the weird ghost stories, things like that. I remember the first time I went to London, I got Edward Rutherford's … I don't know if it's called London or Londinium, I think it's just called London. It's a novel, but it covers a sprawling history of London. And I remember my travel companion, Meg, I think she was so annoyed with me when we were actually there because I kept spouting off all this, like, stuff that I learned from the book. And you can be kind of obnoxious that way. I think I was coming across...

KIM: You’ve watched The Trip movies, right?

AMY: Yes! I love those!

KIM: Oh my gosh, they’re so great!

AMY: Steve Coogan!

KIM: Oh, he’s the best! Oh my gosh, I love him. I love those movies. They’re hilarious. But he’s a bit of that.

AMY: Yes! That’s exactly what I was like, but probably not as funny.

KIM: Yes, and that whole idea of your perception of a place reconciling with actually being there is really interesting to me. The contemporary philosopher Alain de Botton talks about that in his book The Art of Travel. It’s really interesting, and that’s another great travel book. Anyway, I’m guessing people are wondering how any of this actually ties into our discussion today. We’re talking about travel guides, right?

AMY: Yes, but not just any travel guides. So, I want to set the stage here for a second, because it sort of parallels what’s happening right now in the country with the Biden administration unveiling their ambitious infrastructure plan to help create jobs and kick the economy into gear… well, that’s exactly what FDR was doing with his New Deal.

KIM: Yeah, I was hoping Biden would do this because I’ve always admired and been inspired by what FDR did. It was this massive series of programs and public works projects between 1933 and 1939. They were designed to help pull the country out of the Great Depression. 

AMY: Right, and we tend to associate the New Deal with projects like building bridges and roads (If you remember The Tennessee Valley Authority, that was part of it) but people tend to forget that there were also  projects focused on creating jobs in all arenas of life — including, interestingly enough, offering employment for writers, and that’s something I didn’t know about. 

KIM: Yeah, and that is something I’d be happy to have now too! It’s amazing really, because in this day and age there’s so much stinginess about federal funding for the arts. But the Works Progress 

Administration, which was part of the New Deal, included something called the Federal Writers Project, which ended up employing more than 6,500 writers (many of whom were relative unknowns) and the most famous project within this program was a series of travel guides to the United States called the American Guide Series.

AMY: And what you have to remember is that there actually weren’t really any travel guide books for America that were written by Americans around this time period. The go-to guide books would have been Baedeker guides, which were published by a German firm. So basically you had the U.S. government saying, “Okay, we need to get people to work; we need to get writers some employment. Let’s get a bunch of American writers to write about our country, to describe our towns and historic sites and different regions and people.” So that’s what they ended up doing. There were books that were published on all the continental U.S. states as well as Alaska and Puerto Rico, and then they also branched out some books that focused on the major cities like New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Washington D.C. 

KIM: And let me just do a sidebar, because you say Baedeker Guides, and that totally makes me immediately think of A Room With a View and Edith Wharton. I mean, they’re mentioned throughout. That's the books that every tourist that was doing their European tour would take with them, almost to the point of where it became used for irony, because it was so typical that the tourist would be traveling around with this book and basically having it tell them exactly where to go. So that’s interesting and I just had to mention that.

AMY: Yeah, that was the joke. Lucy's chaperone — she wouldn't do anything if it wasn't in the Baedeker Guide, right? And it was a running gag.

KIM: Yeah. Totally. But anyway, back to the books that we’re talking about, 

writers like Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, Saul Bellow and Studs Terkel all participated in the program, but of course there were a lot of women writers involved in the program, too, most notably Zora Neale Hurston.

AMY: Uh-huh, and Hurston was already a pretty successful writer of the Harlem Renaissance when she joined the Federal Writers Project, but the fact that she was trained as a folklorist made her a perfect fit for this gig, because a large part of the work involved going out into the field and interviewing locals — because the guide books really were bringing in the personal accounts of people living in the various regions. So she was travelling around her native Florida to contribute to the projects that related to that part of the country, and the firsthand accounts she collected from people (including many former slaves) helped form the basis for her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

KIM: Okay, the fact that they were going around talking to real people to hear their stories sort of makes it sound like NPR’s StoryCorps.

AMY: Yeah, it’s exactly like StoryCorps, and in fact, this Federal Writers Project program is what inspired NPR to start doing StoryCorps. They wanted to bring back this idea of documenting the stories of everyday Americans. So they’re trying to replicate it.

KIM: Oh, that’s so cool! I love that idea! Oh, you know what, this also actually makes me think of Martha Gelhorn. Was it her that we talked about went to … she was talking to people about what it was like during the um..

AMY: The Depression.

KIM: The Depression. Yeah, sorry! I couldn’t think of the word Depression!

AMY: You're absolutely right. However she was... the program she was involved in was something separate. She was not part of the Federal Writers Program. But it was a similar idea, but she was working with a different agency, I think. 

KIM: Okay.

AMY: But yeah. So another interesting thing: the writers who were involved in this federal program ended up being able to get a lot of firsthand accounts from former slaves (and that’s what was happening with Zora Neale Hurston). So many of these slave accounts were collected, in fact, that they ended up spinning this off into a new project called the Slave Narrative Collection. They basically had too much material to include in the guide books, so they were like, “Let’s just do a whole separate thing on these slave narratives.) So they wound up getting 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery that they documented along with 500 black and white photographs that were compiled. And thank god that they were able to do this while these people were still alive to share their stories! I mean, they captured this before time ran out.

KIM: That’s really incredible, and Colson Whitehead used this collection when writing his Pulitzer-prize-winning 2016 novel The Underground Railroad. (Which, by the way, I thought was absolutely incredible. I loved it.)

AMY: They’re making a movie of it. Or a TV series or something.

KIM: It’s a phenomenal book. I’m sure I’ll be re-reading it more than once. You know how I do that. So you can still find all of these first-person slave narratives on the Library of Congress website and I intend to go read some of them because that’s amazing that we have that as a resource to experience those personal stories by people who lived in that time. 

AMY: Apparently Michael Chabon used the New York City travel guide from the Writers Project when he was writing The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay because it gave him a lot of insight into what the city was like during the Great Depression.

KIM: Oh my gosh, another one of my favorite books that I love that the writers were using these resources to create this. That’s incredible. And it’s so great to know that’s there. Maybe we’ll end up using it one day for a project. So who were some of the other women writers who were involved in the program?

AMY: So in the Chicago region, we had Margaret Walker getting her start through this program. She was a recent Northwestern graduate and she apparently lied about her age so that she could get onto the project. She later went on to become a very famous Harlem Renaissance poet. And then there was also Dorothy West — she ended up being the first black writer to have her short stories published in The New York Daily News. While she was part of the program she wrote an essay about Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem among some other pieces. (I actually did find that one on the Library of Congress website). And she went on to write a novel in 1948 called The Living is Easy. Then there was also poet May Swenson from Utah. She was a poet and playwright of Swedish descent and Harold Bloom actually said that he considered her one of the most important and original poets of the 20th century. So lots of names here that we can be filing away for maybe future episodes. There was also Jewish novelist Anzia Yezierska (if I’m saying that right). She worked for the federal writers program (although she’d already had some success as a writer and Hollywood screenwriter prior to joining up with the program). There’s another author, Meridel Le Seuer, who profiled women in Minnesota whose stories had never been told, and she wrote a very controversial novel based on those interviews that she collected for the writers project and that novel is called The Girl.

KIM: Oh, wow. I think we have The Living is Easy on our list but all these other people need to be on it, and the fact that the poet that Harold Bloom thought was one of the most important and original poets of the 20th century… I’ve never heard of her name. There are  so many lost ladies that we could explore in more depth in future episodes and I have a feeling we’re going to. 

AMY: And I think it's interesting, because the controversy is still happening today, when they're talking about these infrastructure programs, where there's a faction of our government that just wants it to strictly be about building highways and building bridges and things like that. And I think now they're doing a push for, like, universal preschool. They're trying to expand the idea of infrastructure so that women who are traditionally not out on a highway as a construction worker, can also find jobs. And if you look at this program from the New Deal, it's kind of cool that they were able to put women to work, you know, and that wasn't even a priority back then really.

KIM: Absolutely, because when you think about everything we're hearing about how many women have lost their jobs during the pandemic, and how much it's affected women, that completely makes sense that you would want to create jobs where they could participate in a jobs program. That's fantastic.

AMY: And I should add that these travel guides, as they were published, they weren’t really like the travel guides that we have where it’s just like “Here’s where you can eat, here’s where to stay,”... they do have a bit of that, but these books featured so much more. It was really like a mini encyclopedia for the state. There was information on the plants and animals, for example. There were all kinds of essays about the cities. They were much deeper than just a “travel guide.” And they were really lengthy -- the guide to Washington D.C was apparently 1,000 pages. And the California Guide, I should add, was even selected to be part of the “Book of the Month Club” when it was published, so people really enjoyed reading these books. They were considered good. In one review of the guides, The New Republic called the books, “a vast catalogue of secret rooms,” and “a democratic anthology.” 

KIM: In John Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley, he raved about the guides, too, saying, “"If there had been room in Rocinante [that was the name of the mobile trailer he was traveling in) I would have packed the W.P.A. Guides to the States, all forty-eight volumes of them...The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has approached it."[

AMY: So, much of what was collected for these guides is easy to search up on the Library of Congress, as I mentioned, or Google books … you can find by just doing a Google search and a lot of the books have also been republished and you can still purchase them. For example, I just downloaded the Ohio one since I mentioned I was going to Ohio and my husband and I are planning to take a little road trip while we’re there, so I was like, “You know what? I’m going to see what these books have to say about it.” So if you’re curious and want to look into them, I’m sure all the libraries probably have these. They’re titled “the WPA guide to such-and-such.” New Orleans or New York … whatever you’re looking for. Even though they’re 80 years old, I think they still offer a real flavor and there’s still something to be gleaned from them. And also I should give a shout-out to author David Taylor. He wrote a book all about the Federal Writers Program called A Soul of the People and I got a lot of information just by watching some talks that he gave. I love that this whole project, though, just sprang from an endeavor to help writers earn their daily bread. 

KIM: Yeah, I wish they’d do it again! It’s so important that oral stories are preserved like this. So the writing that materialized from this project offered a pure glimpse into the lives of everyday American folks, whereas the author we’ll be discussing next week gives readers a glimpse into the British upper crust. (A comic glimpse, we should say).

AMY: Oh my gosh, I’ve been wanting to feature her ever since we started this podcast and it’s happening! Next week is our “Nancy Mitford” episode, you guys, featuring special guest, New York Times bestselling author Laura Thompson, who wrote biographies on the Mitford family and Nancy Mitford, herself.

KIM: I’m excited too! You won’t want to miss it! In the meantime, don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for information on our upcoming episodes, and leave us a review when you listen to this podcast — those five-star reviews really help us out!

AMY: Bye, everybody!

KIM: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.