First-Person America

Book excerpt: Between 1938 and 1942 the Federal Writers’ Project set out to create a first-person portrait of America by sending young writers—many of whom later became famous—around the country to interview people from all occupations and backgrounds. This book presents 80 of these diverse life histories, including the stories of a North Carolina patent-medicine pitchman, a retired Oregon prospector, a Bahamian midwife from Florida, a Key West smuggler, recent immigrants to New York, and Chicago jazz musicians. Historian Eric Foner called First-Person America “the finest example yet of an increasingly important genre of oral history.”