Ann Banks

First-Person America

"The finest example yet of the increaingly important genre of oral history."—Eric Foner

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 for the first time eighty of these life histories, collectd by Ralph Ellison, May Swenson, Nelson Algren, Jack Conroy, and others, so that we hear again the voice of a North Carolina patent-medicine pitchman, a retired Oregon prospector, a Bahamian midwife from Florida, recent immigrants to New York, a Key West smuggler, Chicago jazz musicians.

"Probably the most important body of unexploited evidence for American social history in the first forty years of the 20th century."—Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

"An inestimably valuable addition to American literature as well as oral history. Ann Banks has excitingly recaptured 'American talk'—the real thing—as put down in the '30s by the WPA Writers' Project"—Studs Terkel

"A deeply satisfying book, full of energy and humor and spiky courage."—Anne Tyler, Detroit News

A tremendously valuable document [with] the clean, clear eloquent ring of authenticity."—Eliot Wigginton, Washington Post Book World

"Another chance to touch with tantalizingly close but rapidly receding past. . . . Almost all the accounts are vivid, and almost all cause astonishment."—Stanley Kauffman, New York Times Book Review