The Federal Writers’ Project Fueled the Cultural Ferment of the New Deal Era
FDR’s Federal Writers’ Project employed thousands of out-of-work writers to produce guidebooks, compile local histories, and collect stories of the country at a moment of turmoil. We need an equivalent program today.
American author Richard Wright was hired to work for the Federal Writers’ Project. (Mondadori via Getty Images)
When Alfred Kazin arrived at the Manhattan office of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) to interview for a job as an editor, the writers were on strike.
The room was “crowded with men and women lying face down on the floor, screaming that they were on strike,” he writes in his memoir of the 1930s. “In order to get to the supervisor’s office at the other end of the hall, I had to make my way over bodies stacked as if after a battle; and as I sat in the supervisor’s office, he calmly discussed the job while shouts and screams came from the long hall outside.”
Kazin didn’t get the job. While he downplays his desire for the position in his memoir, FWP archives include a record of his follow-up about the position. For a precariously employed freelancer and the son of working-class Jewish immigrants, the FWP was a coveted placement, offering job security and a community, strikes and all.
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