The Great Depression was very well documented thanks in part to the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA). The government became one of the biggest sponsors of the arts, employing 8.5 million artists during the WPA's lifetime. Actors and directors were hired to produce plays, painters painted murals for post offices and libraries, composers composed music, and writers were hired to write. From 1936 to 1940, the Federal Writers Project paid sixtyfive hundred writers $20 a week to go out and interview ordinary people and get their life stories. There are more than 10,000 of these accounts archived by the Library of Congress. Many now-famous writers who might not ever have been recognized got their start with the WPA. African American writers like Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston wrote for the WPA. Even John Steinbeck worked briefly for the WPA by conducting a census of...