The Food of a Younger Land Read Free Page B

life; and Richard Wright, who had worked in a post office until he found employment with the Writers’ Project, working on guidebooks while he wrote Native Son in his spare time. Arna Bontemps published his third novel, Drums at Dusk , while working as a supervisor. Other members of the Chicago group included oral historian Studs Terkel, who wrote radio scripts for the project, and dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist Katherine Dunham.

    Conrad Aiken and Josef Berger were among the noted writers on the Massachusetts Project. The New York City Project had Maxwell Bodenheim, Ralph Ellison, Kenneth Patchen, Philip Rahv, and Claude McKay, who in the 1920s had written the first bestseller in America by a black writer. John Cheever worked for the New York State Project. Kenneth Rexroth, the influential Beat poet, worked for the Northern California Writers’ Project.
    Ralph Ellison and Claude McKay were among the prominent writers who gathered material for novels while working for the FWP. In Florida Zora Neale Hurston, though kept at the lowest position, already had to her credit three books, including her best novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God , and was working on a second novel. It is not by chance that African-American literature—Wright, Ellison, McKay, Hurston—made such advances under the FWP. Starting in 1936, one of the major projects under folklore editor John A. Lomax was to interview the remaining blacks in America who had memories of slavery. Every WPA guidebook included a section on black history and culture at a time when this subject was almost never taken on. Several directors felt that blacks should be working on these projects. But a February 1937 report showed that of 4,500 workers on the FWP only 106 were black.
     
     
     
    I n truth, blacks often were not treated well in the southern projects. Hurston, despite her literary accomplishment, was placed on the bottom rung of Florida workers, paid even a few dollars less than the bottom salary because allegedly it would cost her so little to live in a rural black township. When she joined the Florida Writers’ Project in 1938, the Florida editorial staff was called together and told, “Zora Neale Hurston, the Florida Negro novelist, has signed onto the project and will soon be paying us a visit. Zora has been feted by New York literary circles, and is given to putting on airs, including the smoking of cigarettes in the presence of white people. So we must all make allowances for Zora.”
    The talented writers, both veteran and promising, were rare. Yes, Frederick worked in Chicago with Bellow, Wright, and Algren. But he also had on the staff a calligrapher who, for lack of anything else to do, produced handsome business cards for the other writers. Challenged on the competence of FWP writers, director Henry Alsberg could produce the names of only 29 established writers out of 4,500 on the project. In mid-1938 a survey of the FWP staff showed that 82 were recognized writers and another 97 had held major editorial positions. According to the report, 238 had at some time sold something to a newspaper or magazine and 161 were labeled “beginning writers of promise.” This left only another 3,893 “writers” to explain.
    Working with such an uneven staff limited them to projects to which everyone could contribute and then one or two “real writers” could rework. It was Katherine Kellock, a writer who worked for Roosevelt’s New Deal, who came up with an idea. She said that the Federal Writers’ Project ought to “put them to work writing Baedekers,” the leading English-language guidebooks of the time. This was the birth of the American Guide Series.
    Katherine Kellock had given up a higher-paying job to move to the FWP and work on her idea, the guidebooks. She both talked and worked at a feverish rate. There were many jokes about the verbose Mrs. Kellock. She took on the guidebooks as a personal mission, criticizing and cajoling the various state