WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

Arkansas, the guide’s preface reminds us, is a state whose economic patterns and folkways had changed greatly in a single decade, and so its writers leaned as much on the man in the street as on official records. To assemble the book, workers of the Arkansas Writers’ Project haunted libraries, handled countless faded documents, and read hundreds of books and newspapers — then drove thousands of miles over highways that crisscross the Delta, slice through deep pine forests, follow the river valleys, and ride the ridges of the Ozarks and Ouachitas. Out of that collective effort, the editors hoped, came an account that fairly represents the yesterday and today of Arkansas.

The volume follows the series’ familiar four-part plan. Part I, “Arkansas: Past and Present,” opens with Arkansas today and the natural setting, then works through resources and conservation, archaeology and the Indians, history, government, transportation, agriculture, industry and labor, recreation, religion, and education, before turning to the cultural chapters — newspapers and radio, folklore and folkways, architecture, literature, the theater, music, and the handicrafts and painting that flourished in the hills. Part II profiles the cities and towns: Blytheville, El Dorado, Fort Smith, Hot Springs, Jonesboro, Little Rock and North Little Rock, Pine Bluff, and Texarkana.

Part III is the heart of any state guide — seventeen numbered automobile tours, with lettered sub-tours, that reach from the Missouri line down to Louisiana and Texas and across to the Oklahoma and Mississippi borders. They trace the routes through Mammoth Spring and the Ozark resort country, the cotton lands of the Delta, the spa city of Hot Springs, and the timber and bauxite districts, the kind of mile-by-mile detail that made these guides usable on the road. Part IV closes with a chronology, a bibliography, the list of consultants whose local knowledge the editors leaned on, and an index.

The Arkansas guide carries the fingerprints of a notable editorial lineage: Mrs. Bernie Babcock and the writer Charles J. Finger supervised its early stages, before state supervisor Dallas McKown saw the final manuscript through. The editors also reprinted passages from Thomas Nuttall’s 1819 Journal of Travels into the Arkansa Territory, threading the territorial past into a portrait of the state on the edge of the Second World War — its lovely mountains, wide cotton fields, show boats, and curative springs all set down in a single volume.