Authors and the Federal Writers' Project
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Drums at Dusk by Arna Bontemps is an imaginary
story set in the Caribbean island of Saint Dominque two years after
the Parisian mobs stormed the Bastille. French sugar plantation
owners are faced with a slave insurrection. While voodoo drums
rumble in the night air, a gathering of blacks plans to burn cane
fields and mansions, destroying Saint Dominique, the most wealthy
and profitable overseas French Colony of the day. The creole city
of
Le Cap becomes the last refuge before whites flee the island.
Drums at Dusk, title page Arna Bontemps, Author
New York: MacMillan, 1939 General
Collections (74)
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This intriguing portrait of one of the great centers
of black culture and creativity, entitled Harlem: Negro Metropolis,
was written during the high point of America's fascination with
the New York district. As Jamaican-born black author Claude McKay
suggests, not only creative artists, but imaginative and even revolutionary
thinkers swarmed to Harlem just prior to World War
II.
Harlem: Negro Metropolis, p.117 Claude McKay,
Author
New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1940 General
Collections (75)
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The Negro in Virginia is one of the most
thorough studies done on American blacks by WPA writers during
the 1930s and 1940s. Begun under the auspices of the Federal Writers'
Project, the book was completed by the Virginia Project after the
demise of the FWP in 1939. The book covers the whole history and
contributions of
blacks in Virginia, from colonial times to 1940.
The Negro in Virginia, p. 260. Federal Workers
of the Writers' Program of Virginia, comp. New York: Hastings
House, 1940 General Collections (83)
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Creoles and Cajuns, Frenchmen and Spaniards, slaves,
free-blacks,
Englishmen, and Indians, form the incredible social "bouillabaisse" out of which
the writers of the Louisiana WPA extracted this collection of the fantastic folklore
of bayou country. Initiated under the auspices of the Federal Writers' Project,
Gumbo Ya-Ya was compiled by Lyle Saxon, State Director of the Louisiana Project,
and was richly illustrated by Caroline
Durifux and Roland Duevernet.
Gumbo Ya-Ya, title page Compiled by the Louisiana Writers'
Project
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945 General
Collections (84)
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These Are Our Lives is a collection of thirty-five
oral autobiographies of black and white farmers and workers of
the South, recorded by Federal Writers' Project people in the states
of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. The idea of the autobiographies,
as expressed by their initiator, W.T. Couch, of the North Carolina
Project, was to "get life histories which are readable and faithful
representations of living persons, and which . . . will give a
fair picture of the structure of working
society."
These Are Our Lives, title page Writers' Programs of North
Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, comp. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina, 1939 General Collections (85)
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The coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina
proved to be a goldmine for the study of living African traditions
in America. In Drums and Shadows the Georgia Writers' Project chronicled
the tenacity of African artistic and linguistic traditions and
their
influence on American culture.
Drums and Shadows:Survival Studies among the Georgia
Coastal
Negroes, pl. XII Georgia Writers' Project of the WPA, comp. Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1940 General Collections (86) |
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