author
Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of North Dakota
Born out of the New Deal, this state branch of the Federal Writers’ Project helped turn North Dakota’s history, landscapes, and local stories into a vivid guidebook for readers of the 1930s and beyond. Its work belongs to the larger American Guide Series, a landmark effort to document the United States during the Great Depression.
1 Audiobook
North Dakota: A Guide to the Northern Prairie State
by Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of North Dakota
About the author
The Federal Writers' Project was a national program created in 1935 under the Works Progress Administration to give jobs to unemployed writers, editors, and researchers during the Great Depression. The North Dakota unit was one of many state projects that gathered historical material, described local communities, and helped produce a guide to the state as part of the well-known American Guide Series.
Its best-known book is North Dakota: A Guide to the Northern Prairie State (1938), a wide-ranging portrait of the state's history, geography, culture, roads, and towns. Like other guides in the series, it blended practical travel information with folklore, background history, and snapshots of everyday life, preserving details that might otherwise have been lost.
Because this was a government project rather than a single individual author, there is no personal life story in the usual sense. What makes the North Dakota writers' project memorable is the way it captured a place in time: the voices, landmarks, and regional character of North Dakota during one of the hardest decades in American history.