with holiday pomp
autumn Saturdays present
a vivid pageant
In the third week in October, the football season opens with the pomp of a major holiday. On these autumn Saturdays the population is sometimes trebled, and the town presents a vivid pageant.”
A description of Ann Arbor from The WPA Guide to Michigan Federal Writers’ Project, 1941.
During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authors—many of whom would later become celebrated literary figures—were commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor.
Alistair Cooke would later write in the preface the companion book to his 13 part TV series, America, that:
“On all my trips, from the late 1930s on, I packed in an orange crate in the trunk of my car the federal guides to all the states I was likely to drive through. These had been written by penurious writers and local historians enlisted under the Writers Program of the government’s Works Projects Administration during the Depression. America, which had had no guidebooks worth the name, suddenly had a library of the best; and it was these unsung historians who put me on to hundreds of places along the road that few tourists had ever heard about.”
No Haiku For You 