SJSU News Archive
Date: 09/08/2009
"Soul of a People: Writing America's Story" will debut this week on TV and at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Library. The Smithsonian Channel documentary covers the Federal Writers Project, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration. The project paid writers to produce state guidebooks, which struck a nerve when they described not just America's triumphs, but its realities based on interviews with everyday people -- including Harlem schoolchildren, Chicago fishmongers, Cuban cigar makers, Nebraskan meatpackers and blind musicians.
When The WPA Guide to California was originally published in the 1930s, bus fare in San José was seven cents, the speed limit was 25 MPH, and San José State College had 2,600 students. In a 1984 reprint, historian Gwendolyn Wright wrote: "The men and women working for the Writers' Project captured an extraordinary moment of self-consciousness about the state's past, its future, and its present -- the California of the thirties, caught between the dilemmas of the Depression and the fear of war. They offer a potpourri of historical bravado and sociological data.''
King Library will host a series of related events beginning Saturday, September 12. The talks and performances will feature many San José State faculty members. The SJSU Theatre Department will present a dramatic adaption of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck supported the program and used the guides extensively, especially while writing Travels With Charley. Thirty libraries nationwide received National Endowment for the Humanities grants seeking to showcase WPA writers and their work, as well as to encourage public dialogue on national and regional identity and the interplay between history, literature and culture.