NATIVE GEOGRAPHY: RICHARD WRIGHT’S WORK FOR THE FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT IN CHICAGO

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NATIVE GEOGRAPHY: RICHARD WRIGHT’S WORK FOR THE FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT IN CHICAGO

Perhaps the most famous anecdote about the influence of the Federal Writers Project (FWP) on writers in its employ is that about Ralph Ellison, who–while working on the “Living Lore” folklore project in New York City–collected a story about an invisible man, the apparent inspiration for his later novel. More recently, in Go Gator and Muddy the Water, Pamela Bordelon has published many of Zora Neale Hurston’s writings for the Florida project, revealing deep connections between Hurston’s FWP fieldwork and the settings of her fiction. While Richard Wright is often hailed as the “poster child” for the Writers’ Project, not enough has been written about the influence of the FWP on his work. The following previously unpublished essay by Wright, “A Survey of Amusement Facilities of District #35,” clearly suggests that his work for the FWP was a major influence on Wright’s fiction. Scholars of African American literature now recognize a “Chicago Renaissance,” led partly by Wright, as an important follow-up-and radical revision of the aesthetics of–the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Critics such as Robert Bone and Deborah Barnes trace the influence of African American writers in Chicago during this period, many of whom met while working on the Chicago Writers’ Project. As early as 1950, Arna Bontemps claimed that while “Harlem got its renaissance in the middle ‘twenties …. Ten years later Chicago reenacted it on WPA without finger bowls but with increased power” (46). A friend of Ellison’s, Albert Murray, goes a step further, claiming that the FWP “put writers and artists in touch as they never had been before. It was even more intense than the Harlem Renaissance” (Brinkley B7). The Illinois Writers’ Project had “a healthier percentage [of African-American staffers] than in any other state,” with nine African American writers on board (Rowley 108). Wright was on the payroll along with established and emerging talents such as Margaret Walker, Frank Yerby, and eventually Bontemps himself, who joined the Project in 1937. Given this group of luminaries, Bontemps’s declaration about 1930’s Chicago rivaling 1920’s Harlem makes sense. In his seminal 1986 article proposing a “Chicago Renaissance,” Robert Bone also discusses the “Wright generation,” since Wright was as much if not more of an influence than geography in shaping the period’s aesthetics and agenda. As Bontemps’s and Murray’s comments suggest, the Chicago Writers’ Project was one of the most fertile sources for the Renaissance Wright sparked. A close examination of the extensive and impressive work African American researchers and writers did for the Chicago project from 1936-1941 indicates that they had far more ambitious plans than the Project’s ultimate publication record provides. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (ALPL) in Springfield, Illinois, has the most extensive collection of materials written for the Illinois Writers’ Project, including many by the African American unit. Plans exist for a book-length manuscript on The Negro in Illinois and another titled The Negro Press in Chicago [ALPL FWP Box 100]; a lone researcher and author, Kitty Chappelle, penned a nearly 700-page manuscript on “The Development of Negro Culture in Chicago” [ALPL FWP Box 78]; and other writers produced shorter but complete manuscripts on various topics, such as the history of jazz music in Chicago, that seem close to publication readiness. The Illinois Project’s focus and goals became clearer as the Project evolved. Started in 1935, it initially focused, as did all the state projects, on amassing materials for a state guidebook, as well as collecting folklore and slave narratives, all duly represented in the ALPL’s holdings. However, documents from the early years of the project also suggest that researchers and writers were amassing information simply to be amassing information; numerous summaries of recent books and multiple accounts of the general history of African Americans may partly confirm accusations that the WPA projects were simply “make-work.

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