... impressive ... Borchert’s survey is absorbing from beginning to end and impeccably researched and written; it neglects neither telling details nor big-picture conclusions, and it lets each of its central figures come alive on the page. I have only three quibbles: I wish it had devoted more space to Kellock, the guides’ intrepid editor; included even a cursory list of the project’s publications [...] and quoted more material from the guides themselves.
... engaging ... a lively chronicle of the rambunctious years of the FWP ... Borchert has produced an essential road map [...] Republic of Detours is a lively history of the project and its writers, but it offers something even more valuable: a lesson in the organizational challenges and poisonous politics that eventually doomed the FWP not in spite of its best intentions, but because of them.
Borchert, through a series of biographical chapters on some of the best-known authors, engrossingly shows how the New Deal recognized art as labor and why that model should be reinvigorated today ... Republic of Detours mobilizes New Deal history to help us imagine what our society would be like if federal tax dollars supported a reserve army of muralists, poets, and oral historians.
... a dynamic and discriminating cultural history that speaks to both readers who know something about the project and those who don't. Like the American Guides these Depression-era writers worked on, Borchert's book teems with colorful characters, scenic byways and telling anecdotes; his own writing style is full of 'verve' — the much prized quality that so many of the guides themselves possessed ... Borchert also makes a timely case for viewing these guidebooks — assembled in part out of the narratives of formerly enslaved people and histories of 'economic struggles' — as presenting a 'multitudinous' national story that was directly at odds with the Euro-centric, 'whites only' one cherished by nativists.
... as inviting, compelling, comprehensive, and endearingly quirky as the volumes it celebrates and explains ... Borchert’s brilliant account of how Representative Martin Dies Jr., whose chairmanship of the House Un-American Affairs Committee won him historical opprobrium, took on — or more, precisely, attempted to take down — the project is a discordant coda to the surprise symphony of the American Guides series.
... terrific ... the eccentrics, ideologues, wags, alcoholics, malcontents, and dreamers who churned out reams of magnificently reported prose is a story well worth telling ... Borchert writes evocatively, even lovingly, about Washington, DC, in the 1930s, a place of creative ferment emerging from its lingering Southern provincialism into status as a global city ... Republic of Detours also serves as a snapshot of American literary culture in the Depression, thanks to Borchert’s accretion of details about his writer-subjects and the conflicted personalities behind the smoothed-out prose ... Borchert writes perceptively about the new form of racial manners [Richard] Wright encountered ... Borchert writes with a perceptive eye ... Borchert has done heroic work in the archives, mining long-neglected letters and dull government reports for the same type of life-giving detail that this school of national literary history, and its thoughtful conceivers, thrived upon.
Republic of Detours...shows that when a good writer meets a subject for which he or she has a passion, the result is almost always going to be fine, no matter that others have treated it before ... He’s excellent at character studies, offering fresh takes and material on familiar figures ... Mr. Borchert, a freelance writer and editor based in New Jersey, is a resourceful and indefatigable researcher, absorbing the capacious secondary literature and also plumbing the vast archival records of the Writers’ Project and emerging with choice morsels ... Another of Mr. Borchert’s proficiencies is his firm grasp of the always contentious and often convoluted politics of the time.
... fascinating and highly readable ... The chapters on Hurston and Wright are especially interesting; they detail the writers’ struggling with segregated spaces within the project, and their efforts to publish accurate depictions of the lives of Black Americans in the 1930s ... This fascinating and enjoyable volume is recommended for all readers interested in American literary history.
Poet W. H. Auden characterized the Depression Era’s Federal Writers’ Project as “one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by a state.” Borchert’s comprehensive history of that project’s American Guides series amply bears out Auden’s assessment ... Borchert focuses on a few of the most notable writers ... Borchert’s vast research and appreciation of this stellar group shows what government nurturing of artists can accomplish in even the worst of times.
... wide-ranging and deeply researched ... Delving deep into the program’s day-to-day operations, Borchert describes the difficulties some regional offices had in hiring competent writers, and tensions over whether the goal of the FWP was 'simply to provide work or to nurture the creative energies of the people it employed.' Though long-winded at times, Borchert’s lucid prose brings the FWP and its colorful personalities to life. Literature and history buffs will learn much from this immersive portrait of 1930s America.
