Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
I've just finished reading an article in the New York Times by Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center and professor of History at the University of New Orleans. The article is about a literary project that was started in 1935, the Federal Writers Project, part of Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration.
The project aimed at supporting writers during the Great Depression, doling out $20-25 a week. The project supported more than 6,600 writers, editors and researchers and the beneficiaries included Saul Bellow, Harold Rosenberg, Richard Wright and others. The project continued until 1943. Now the Library of Congress is making available documents that have been kept in warehouses and storage facilities.
One of the main objectives of the project was to produce what has come to be called the American Guide Series, comprising a volume on each American state. All in all, according to Brinkley the project published 275 books, 700 pamphlets and 340 articles, leaflets and radio scripts.
W H Auden called the project "one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by a state". John Cole, director of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, has just finished the arduous process of collecting and cataloguing, a job he started in 1978. Cole explains that the Federal Writers Project "helped us rediscover our heritage in more detailed and more colourful way than it had ever been described".
Besides the written guides there are nearly 3,000 oral histories, now available on a special Web site. Not all the written contributions have been published and a number of scholars and researchers have begun to follow "the literary paper trail, unearthing documents and writings that have been packed in boxes for decades".
But the project resulted in more than guidebooks and oral testimonies. It was, as one writer put it, "where social and economic history met the individual imagination in literature". Writers supported by the project were assigned specific tasks: Saul Bellow, for instance, was given the job of writing 20 page profiles of writers like John Dos Passos and Sherwood Anderson.
The project also acted as a source of information for writers of novels with city backgrounds. Stud Terkel, a novelist who was employed by the project "used the oral history techniques he learned in the late 1930s as his model for books like The Good War (1984) while Ralph Ellison, author of The Invisible Man, could not have written it without the sketches and caricatures of people he met during the Federal Writers Project".
John Steinbeck made use of the guidebooks when he wrote Travels with Charley. And In Search of America (1962) Steinbeck wrote: "The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since then has even approached it. It was compiled during the Depression by the best writers in America, who were, if that is possible, more depressed than any other group while maintaining their inalienable instinct for eating."
When I finished reading the article I thought of a similar project in Egypt, Al- Tafarrugh, a word that literally translates as devotion. The project was initiated by the Higher Council of Arts and Literature and intended to encourage writers and artists to produce work in their respective fields.
Writers and artists apply. If they hold jobs they are granted a sabbatical from their work place and paid their salaries by the project. The sabbatical can be extended over several years. Artists are supplied with the materials they require while non-working applicants are given salaries.
Another scheme, The First Book Project, also started by the Higher Council of Arts and Literature aimed at publishing writers' debut novels. It was a great success and many writers now established were first introduced to the public by it.
