John Steinbeck Praised the State Guide Books
John Steinbeck. Photo by Bettmann/Corbis and courtesy of The New York Times.
By Gibbs Kinderman:
The “Traveling 219” project was inspired by the New Deal Federal Writers Project and the Guides to the States it produced. Nobel Prize winning writer John Steinbeck, who was a struggling young author when he was hired to work for the Writers’ Project, was also a big fan of these amazing books. In his 1962 book Travels With Charley, a chronicle of a trip he took around the United Sates with his standard poodle Charley in a truck camper, Steinbeck wrote:
“If there had been room in Rocinante [his truck camper] I would have packed the WPA Guides to the States, all forty-eight volumes of them. I have all of them, and some are very rare. If I remember correctly, North Dakota printed only eight hundred copies and South Dakota only about five hundred. The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it. It was compiled during the depression by the best writers in America, who were, if that is possible, more depressed than any other group while maintaining their inalienable instinct for eating. But these books were detested by Mr. Roosevelt’s opposition.”
The camper, called Rocinante, that John Steinbeck drove across the United States in 1960. Photo by Noah Berger, courtesy of The New York Times
“If W.P.A. workers leaned on their shovels, writers leaned on their pens. The result was that in some states the plates were broken up after a few copies were printed, and that is a shame because they were reservoirs of organized, documented, and well-written information, geological, historical, and economic.”
“If I had carried my guides along, for example, I would have looked up Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where I stopped, and would have known why it was called Detroit Lakes, who named it, when, and why. I stopped there late at night and so did Charley, and I don’t know any more about it than he does.” 
West Virginia, A Guide to the Mountain State, has been out of print for almost 75 years. It is a truly amazing work, and was the direct inspiration for the Traveling 219 Project – history of the people, by the people and for the people.
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