Republic of Detours

From 1935–1943, the United States government did something unprecedented in its history: it hired thousands of destitute writers and paid them to write. What was even more unusual about the Federal Writers’ Project—as the agency that employed them was called—was that its expectation of any writing being produced was secondary to its mission of providing these writers (and the historians, editors, and librarians the FWP also employed) with paychecks.