Review: First-Person America

First-Person America by Ann Banks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

From between 1938 and 1942 when the Federal Writers’ Project set out to create a first-person portrait of America through young writers (many of whom later became successful like Stetson Kennedy) interviewing people from varied occupations and backgrounds. This book presents 80 of these diverse life histories, all narrated from texts including often the interviewers qualitative assessment of the subject, observations, and notes on techniques. Included are the stories of a North Carolina patent-medicine pitchman, a retired Oregon prospector and other mining industry veterans, a Bahamian midwife from Florida with her philosophic medicine, a Key West smuggler claiming to be the model for To Have and Have Not), and Chicago jazz musicians recalling Jimmy McPartland and Bix Beiderbecke. There are also a few, strident recollections of laboring women on the stresses and needs for unionizing slaughterhouses and other sweatshops.

View all my reviews