WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series

When the Federal Writers’ Project set out to describe California for the American Guide Series, its editors faced a problem most state guides never had to solve: California was not one place but a dozen, and any single book attempting to hold it risked bursting at the spine. The finished guide, published in May 1939 under the sponsorship of State Librarian Mabel R. Gillis, runs to more than eight hundred pages, and even its own preface admits the staff sometimes wished the state were smaller so it might be covered in greater detail. What survived the editing process is still extraordinary: a sweeping account of California’s natural setting, its first peoples, four centuries of contested history, and the industries, from agriculture to motion pictures, that had remade it into a national symbol of opportunity by the time the guide went to press.

The book divides its work into four parts. The first traces California from prehistory through the Gold Rush and into the modern economy, with chapters on conservation, labor, the press, education, and the arts that read less like a tourist brochure than a social history of a state still finding its footing after the Depression. The second part turns to fourteen cities, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, and others, each rendered with the same attention to architecture and daily life that the Project brought to its rural tours. The third and longest section, "Up and Down the State," lays out fourteen numbered automobile tours and their many subsections, threading from the Oregon line to the Mexican border and into Yosemite, Sequoia, and Death Valley, the kind of practical, mile-by-mile detail that made these guides genuinely usable on the road rather than merely decorative on a shelf. A closing set of appendices offers a chronology and a reading list for those who want to go further.

What distinguishes the California volume within the wider series is the caliber of the writers the Project happened to employ in the state. Kenneth Rexroth, later a central figure of the San Francisco Renaissance, worked on the Northern California staff; Harry Partch, the composer who would go on to build his own instruments and tuning systems, worked on the Southern California team. Their presence does not announce itself in any single passage, the prose throughout is deliberately unsigned and even-handed, but it helps explain why the guide reads with more curiosity than a typical government reference work. The editors were also candid about their debts, acknowledging earlier guidebooks by Aubrey Drury and Fremont Rider, and about their method, which involved sorting through far more material than the finished pages could hold.

Eighty-five years later, the California guide remains valuable for exactly the reason the original preface hoped it would be: it offers both the visitor and the lifelong resident something to discover. Its description of Hollywood predates the studio system's postwar consolidation; its account of the state's labor movements captures tensions that were still raw in 1939; its road tours preserve a California built mostly before the interstate highway system reshaped how the state moved. Read today, it is at once a practical period guidebook and a primary historical document, two purposes the Federal Writers' Project rarely managed to serve equally well, and did here.