Works Progress Administration: 5 books

In 1938, under the direction of novelist and historian Lyle Saxon, The Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration produced this delightfully detailed portrait of New Orleans. Containing recipes, photographs and folklore, it is consistently hailed as one of the best books produced about...

"San Francisco has no single landmark by which the world may identify it," according to San Francisco in the 1930s, originally published in 1940. This would surely come as a surprise to the millions who know and love the Golden Gate Bridge or recognize the Transamerica Building’s pyramid....

San Diego in the 1930s offers a lively account of the city’s culture, roadside attractions, and history—from the days of the Spanish missions to the pre-Second World War boom. The guide is revealing both in the opinions it embodies and in the juicy details it records—tidbits such as the bloodiest...

Los Angeles in the 1930s returns to print an invaluable document of Depression-era Los Angeles, illuminating a pivotal moment in L.A.’s history, when writers like Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were creating the images and associations—and the mystique—for which the...

Alive with the exuberance, contradictions, and variety of the Golden State, this Depression-era guide to California is more than 700 pages of information that is, as David Kipen writes in his spirited introduction, "anecdotal, opinionated, and altogether habit-forming." Describing the history,...