American Guide Series

Cover of the Illinois state guide

The American Guide Series is a group of books and pamphlets published from 1937 to 1941 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. Although not then a state, a guide for Alaska^[2] was published, and also for Puerto Rico (but not for Hawaii).

John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley: "If there had been room in Rocinante I would have packed the W.P.A. Guides to the States, all forty-eight volumes of them...The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has approached it."^[3]

Titles[]

States[]

Cities[]

Regions and territories[]

Mount Hood: A Guide (1940)

References[]

Further reading[]

• Mangione, Jerre "The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project 1935-1943", Little, Brown, 1972
• Christine Bold (1999), The WPA Guides: Mapping America, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ISBN 1578061946
• 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. 2006
• Powell, Lawrence N. "Lyle Saxon and the WPA Guide to New Orleans." Southern Spaces 29 July 2009.
• Kelly, Andrew. "Kentucky by Design: The Decorative Arts and American Culture", University Press of Kentucky, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8131-5567-8
• DeMasi, Susan Rubenstein. Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force of the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project, McFarland and Co., 2016.
• David M. Shribman (March 19, 2021), "Dreaming of a Federal Writers' Project 2.0", Boston Globe

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