–Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” an interview
The documentary Soul of A People: Writing America’s Story (2009), tells the story of the Federal Writer’s Project, commissioned during the Great Depression of the 1930s, to collect the experiences of everyday Americans, through the form of guidebooks to cities and states, among other genres.
This project brought together well-known, and soon-to-be-well-known writers and artists, including Ralph Ellison, Studs Terkel, Richard Wright, Dorothea Lange and Zora Neale Hurston to document their cities and hometowns and to create guidebooks like this, one of my favorite of all time:
I’ve been thinking a lot about guide books and travel writing, normally at the bottom of the literary heap, considered low-brow, and nowhere near scholarly; throwaway fare, worthy only of that most terrible of pests: ‘the tourist.’ And yet:
