The Federal Writers Project was a program formed under the Works Progress Administration. It was approved in June of 1935 (“New Deal Programs”), six years after the Great Depression started.
Roosevelt’s government was concerned about unemployed writers. The work creation programs that had started up until then were only in blue-collar work, like construction. Writers, particularly, had a specific skill set and needed jobs that they were suited for (“About the Project”). The Federal Writers
Project was created to fill this need, and provided research and writing jobs for anyone in the literary arts such as writers, librarians, teachers, lawyers, and historians (“New Deal Programs,” “About the
Project”).
The project was first created to make a series of guide books. There were 49 books created, one for each state in the U.S. at the time and another for the District of Columbia. The guide books not only had scenic and geographical information about each state, but included historical, cultural, and economic information also (“New Deal Programs”). The guides include pictures, maps, and even drawings. Half of the materials that still exist pertaining to the Federal Writers Project are linked to the American Guide series (“About the Project”). The project eventually employed 6,000 writers. Today, the guides are quite collectible. Many people try to get the entire set. Some of the books are worth hundreds of dollars. One particularly interesting guide was for Washington, DC. It weighed four pounds, which
President Roosevelt thought was too heavy for a guide book that a tourist would carry around while visiting the Capital. The publishers took his advice and later printed a smaller version that would be more user-friendly (“The American Guide Series”).
Another part of the Federal Writers Project was slave narratives. The writers realized that former slaves were now elderly and they wanted to record their stories before they passed away and their experiences were lost forever. Employees of the Federal Writers Project started interviewing the former slaves to preserve their stories (“About the Project”). By the end of the project, they had the stories of
2,300 former slaves. Along with the stories, they took pictures of the interview subjects, resulting in 500 black-and-white photographs. The entire project was compiled into a 17-volume microfilm series called
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves (“New
Deal Programs”). This series resulted in several published books that are still available from Amazon and bookstores.
Works Cited
“Federal Writers' Project: About the Project." Federal Writers' Project: About the Project. Library of
Congress - American Memory, 19 Oct. 1998. Web. 28 Nov. 2012.
<http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpafwp.html>.
“New Deal Programs: Selected Library of Congress Resources." Federal Writers' Project: New Deal Web
Guide (Virtual Programs & Services, Library of Congress). Library of Congress, 29 July 2011.
Web. 28 Nov. 2012.

United States. Senate. The American Guide Series. Virtual Reference Desk, n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2012.
<http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/WPAStateGuides.pdf>.