American Guide Series

Cover of the Illinois state guide

The American Guide Series was a group of books and pamphlets published in 1937–41 under the auspices of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP), a Depression-era works program in the United States. The American Guide Series books were compiled by the FWP, but printed by individual states, and contained detailed histories of each of the then 48 states of the Union with descriptions of every major city and town. In total, the project employed over 6,000 writers. The format was uniform, comprising essays on the state's history and culture, descriptions of its major cities, automobile tours of important attractions, and a portfolio of photographs.^[1]

Many books in the project have been updated by private companies or republished without updating. While not states, guides for Alaska^[2] and Puerto Rico were published, however Hawaii was not.

Titles

References

Further reading

• Christine Bold (1999), The WPA Guides: Mapping America, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ISBN 1578061946
• DeMasi, Susan Rubenstein. Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force of the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project, McFarland and Co., 2016.
• Kelly, Andrew. "Kentucky by Design: The Decorative Arts and American Culture", University Press of Kentucky, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8131-5567-8
• Gross, Andrew S. "The American Guide Series: Patriotism as Brand-Name Identification" Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory. Vol 62 Number 1. p. 85-111.
• Mangione, Jerre "The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project 1935-1943", Little, Brown, 1972
• Powell, Lawrence N. "Lyle Saxon and the WPA Guide to New Orleans." Southern Spaces 29 July 2009.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to American Guide Series.

• American Guide Series: Guidebooks for each state, including Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii, published by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration, 1940–42, (121 titles dispersed in the division's collection). From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress
• University of South Florida Libraries: Tampa WPA Papers Manuscripts and revised typescripts of the Florida edition of the American Guide Series, particularly to the City of Tampa