In the middle of the Depression, Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) set out to increase American purchasing power by getting the unemployed back to work. For the most part they planted forests, graded roads and developed outdoorsy holiday resorts, but the WPA also recruited 40,000 writers, theatrical workers, musicians and artists, most of them on relief, to work on four Federal Arts Projects. The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) employed up to 13,000 actors, producers, stage designers and technical staff, and produced around 1200 plays. The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) set 6700 writers, clerks, typists and managers to work on schemes ranging from the collection of personal accounts by former slaves to an ambitious programme for American Guidebooks, which as well as conventional tourist information also covered the history and the cultural, social and physical geography of each American state.

LRB 18 March 2004 | PDF Download