Creating A Hoosier Self-Portrait

The story of the New Deal program that helped to preserve the history and cultural heritage of Indiana during the Great Depression.

From 1935 to 1942, the Indiana office of the Federal Writers’ Program hired unemployed writers as “field workers” to create a portrait in words of the land, the people, and the culture of the Hoosier state. This book tells the story of the project and its valuable legacy. Beginning work under the guidance of Ross Lockridge, whose son would later burst onto the American literary scene with his novel Raintree County, the group would eventually produce Indiana: A Guide to the Hoosier State, Hoosier Tall Stories, and other publications. Though many projects were never brought to completion, the Program’s work remains a useful and rarely tapped storehouse of information on the history and culture of the state.

“An important history of the Indiana state Federal Writers’ Project . . . straightforward . . . persuasive . . . impassioned. This is an important social history of Depression-era Indiana and a guide for future research.” —A. B. Audant, CUNY Kingsborough Community College