Driving around the state, Fisher would stop at nightfall and then write until midnight. One of the most compelling writers whose story Borchert recovers in the book is that of Vardis Fisher, a temperamental, little-known novelist who directed the project in Idaho and pretty much wrote that state's guide himself. of roughly 4,500 FWP workers in February 1937, only 106 were Black." In New York, Borchert tells us, "a mail carrier applied because he was 'a man of letters.'" Despite its generous ambitions, however the project was restrictive when it came to race: Borchert acknowledges that while "ome of the most talented Black writers in the country were concentrated in the New York City and Chicago offices. That inclusive definition attracted some peculiar applicants. Consequently, one of the principles of the Federal Writers' Project was that it regarded writing "as a craft like any other - or, better yet, as a form of labor." That tug of war between two visions of America, as Borchert recognizes, has only intensified today and makes his excursion into the Federal Writers' Project and the American Guides it produced much more than a nostalgic road trip.īorchert takes inspiration in structuring “Republic of Detours” from the idiosyncratic waywardness of the guidebooks themselves: His chapters are dubbed "Tours," and they circle around key figures like, for instance, Henry Alsberg, a lawyer and journalist in his 50s, who was at loose ends when he was appointed by Harry Hopkins, the head of the Works Progress Administration, to direct this work relief project.Īlsberg and his team quickly came up with the idea of guidebooks because such collective writing assignments would "absorb a maximum number of jobless workers from the relief roles." Speaking at a Federal Writers' Project staff meeting, Hopkins stressed that the welfare of human beings came first their literary qualifications came second. Throughout “Republic of Detours,” Borchert also makes a timely case for viewing these guidebooks - assembled in part out of the narratives of formerly enslaved people and histories of "economic struggles" - as presenting a "multitudinous" national story that was directly at odds with the Euro-centric, "whites only" one cherished by nativists. Like the American Guides these Depression-era writers worked on, Borchert's book teems with colorful characters, scenic byways and telling anecdotes his own writing style is full of "verve" - the much prized quality that so many of the guides themselves possessed. What he pulls off in “Republic of Detours” is a dynamic and discriminating cultural history that speaks to both readers who know something about the project and those who don't.
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