'Things ain't now like they used to be nohow, ' a Virginia native told a WPA worker in the 1930s. Indeed, a central theme unifying the hundreds of life histories recorded by Virginia Writers' Project fieldworkers between 1938 and 1941 is that the narrators all bear witness to the vast socioeconomic and cultural changes brought about by the Great Depression and the New Deal's responses to it. These never-published VWP narrative interviews, however, have remained largely unknown and unavailable to readers until now. Talk about Trouble presents 61 Writers' Project life histories that...
'Things ain't now like they used to be nohow, ' a Virginia native told a WPA worker in the 1930s. Indeed, a central theme unifying the hundreds of lif...