WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

Florida’s American Guide Series volume was first published in 1939 by Oxford University Press under the sponsorship of the State of Florida Department of Public Instruction, and proved durable enough to reach an eighth printing by 1956. Its foreword, by John J. Tigert, President of the University of Florida, describes the state as “the last American frontier” and frames the book as a journey of contrasts, from “quaint old St. Augustine to metropolitan Miami,” from antebellum Tallahassee to modern Palm Beach, written for the million-plus annual visitors as much as for Floridians themselves.

The preface, signed by State Director Carita Doggett Corse, describes the guide as a genuinely co-operative product: the Federal Writers’ Project served partly as a clearing-house for material supplied by more than four hundred outside experts and partly as a creative staff in its own right, drawing on historical societies, chambers of commerce, and transportation companies across the state. The Florida Federal Art Project supplied the volume’s sketches, the American Philosophical Society granted permission to use certain archeological material, and Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. permitted the Project to quote lines from Wallace Stevens’s “Harmonium” in the literature essay.

The book divides into four parts. The first lays out Florida’s background in seventeen essays, moving from a contemporary survey through natural setting, archeology, history, industry, and the arts. The second profiles twelve principal cities, Daytona Beach, Jacksonville, Key West, Greater Miami, Orlando, Palm Beach, Pensacola, St. Augustine, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Tallahassee, and Tampa, each treated at length. The third part, titled “The Florida Loop,” is the most extensive road survey in the early series: twenty-two numbered tours and their lettered branches trace the peninsula from the Georgia line to Key West and across the panhandle to Pensacola, documenting a road network, and an early alignment of the Tamiami Trail, built mostly in the years just before the guide went to press.

A closing set of appendices includes a chronology, bibliography, and the unusually candid courtesy of a full list of consultants, a register of the citizens, librarians, and specialists whose knowledge the small Project staff depended upon to cover so large and fast-changing a state.

Eight decades and eight printings later, the Florida guide remains a detailed record of a state still being built, its citrus groves, packing houses, and young resort towns described in the years just before wartime growth and postwar development would remake the peninsula again.