![]() (At the time, one in four people in publishing was out of work.) It was mired in bureaucracy and inefficiency, you had to take a pauper’s oath to get hired, and the whole thing was axed, four years after it got started, by people in Congress who were convinced it was a Communist front. At its peak, the W.P.A.’s Federal Writers’ Project employed more than six thousand writers-from newspaper reporters to playwrights, anybody who used to make some kind of living by writing and couldn’t anymore-including Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, John Cheever, and Richard Wright. He was asking because it was his job to ask: he was muddling through the Depression on a paycheck from the Works Progress Administration, which people liked to call the Whistle, Piss, and Argue department but which was something to do, anyway, and better than the dole. Ellison took all that down, on a nice neat form. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |