These 50 American Guide Series volumes were produced by Federal Writers' Project

THIS JUST IN: Here are about 50 volumes of the American Guide Series, the largest undertaking of the Federal Writers’ Project during the Great Depression. The Federal Writers’ Project was a New Deal initiative under FDR’s administration designed to put unemployed writers, editors, and researchers back to work. There are numerous state guides, of course, and a couple focused on cities, San Francisco and New Orleans. Zora Neale Hurston, Corita Doggett, Corse, and Stetson Kennedy worked on the Florida guide. We’ll discuss that tomorrow. Click on the image to enlarge it. To enquire about any or all of these items, please call (727) 822-3278.

Happy birthday, A. Philip Randolph

It is the birthday of civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph (1889), who is credited with forming the first predominantly black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925. The union succeeded to winning better working conditions and pay for workers. In 1941, he organized a march on Washington to seek an end to discrimination in war industries. However, the march never took place because President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that became known as the Fair Employment Act. Later, Randolph led a protest seeking to end segregation in the armed forces, following which President Harry Truman issued an executive order to do just that. Randolph was born in Crescent City, Florida, and raised in Jacksonville.

Happy birthday, William Allen White

It is the birthday of newspaper editor and Progressive political leader William Allen White (1868), who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for editorial writing, wrote numerous novels about small-town ideals, and biographies of Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge. He also wrote non-fiction political and social commentary, including The Old Order Changeth (1910), Politics: A Citizen’s Business (1924), Forty Years on Main Street (1937), and The Changing West (1939). He was a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt and supported him politically. He never voted for President Franklin D. Roosevelt but staunchly supported his New Deal policies, though he considered them haphazard. His autobiography, published in 1947 three years after his death, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Happy birthday, Robert Sherwood

It is the birthday of playwright Robert Sherwood (1896), who won four Pulitzer Prizes, three for his plays and one for a biography. Sherwood served as film critic for Vanity Fair magazine in the 1920s. He was among the founders of the Algonquin Round Table, the storied gathering of New York writers and wits, along with fellow magazine staffers Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. Sherwood's play Idiot's Delight (1936) won his first Pulitzer. It is the story of a dance troupe stranded in an Alpine hotel as war breaks out. Sherwood also won for Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938) and There Shall Be No Night (1940), which is set in Finland just before the Russian invasion. Sherwood also served as speech writer for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and is credited with inspiring the phrase "arsenal of democracy" that Roosevelt used in speeches to generate support for the Allied war effort. Sherwood's book Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate Portrait (1948) won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Wendell Willkie: ambassador, womanizer

Wendell Willkie

It is the birthday of lawyer Wendell Willkie (1892), who ran unsuccessfully for president against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, later became an ambassador-at-large for Roosevelt and traveled around the world to advance a concept of a planet freed from colonialism and imperialism. Willkie's book, One World (1943), told the story of his travels and became a bestseller, one of the most widely read books of the 20th century. Scholars consider it a crucial element in gaining support for Roosevelt's policy of helping Britain resist dictators. It was a powerful force in guiding national thought toward creating the United Nations and the United States' participation in international affairs. It was also effective in turning many Republicans away from isolationism.

Willkie was widely known in political circles and among newspaper reporters as a womanizer. In fact, he made no attempt to hide his affair with Irita Van Doren, the popular book editor of The New York Herald Tribune. She was divorced and they lived together despite the fact that Willkie was married. They traveled together and were invited as a couple to friends' homes. When it looked like Willkie, who was president of a utility holding company, might actually become a presidential candidate, advisers urged that his paramour be kept in the background until after the election.

Willkie resented the hypocrisy of politics and refused. He believed his private life was his own. After the nomination, when a reporter confronted Willkie about the affair, he is said to have replied, "I am in love with another woman — and I don't intend to apologize for that and pretend that it isn't so. If you print this story, my campaign for the Presidency is probably over. But that is your decision. I have made mine."

The story was never printed but a Broadway play, State of the Union (1945) by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, was loosely based on Willkie's affair. It opened after Willkie's death and ran for 765 performances. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Frank Capra directed a 1948 film adaptation.

In 1944, as Willkie began seeking the Republican nomination again, he published a book titled An American Program. It was a collection of articles he had written for various newspapers on his vision for the nation plus critical analyses of the Republican and Democratic platforms. After losing in the Wisconsin primary, Willkie withdrew from the race. He never held public office.

Willkie was the subject of two biographies and other books, including Willkie (1952), Dark Horse (1984), The Republican Party and Wendell Willkie (1960, reprinted 1981), Roosevelt and Willkie (1968), Wendell Willkie: Hoosier Internationalist (1992).

John Toland wrote of Hitler, WWII

John Toland

It is the birthday of author and historian John Toland (1912), whose book The Rising Sun, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. Toland conducted interviews with Japanese government officials who had survived the war and pored over personal letters and official field reports from military commanders to construct a history of the Pacific war from the Japanese perspective. His was the first such effort in English.

Toland may be best known for his Adolph Hitler: The Definitive Biography (1976), an exhaustive study of the German dictator that reprinted texts of many of his speeches, including the earliest ones before he came to power. The book provided many previously unknown details about the man. Toland tried to provide an objective view of Hitler, an effort that drew criticism and accusations of being a Nazi.

Toland also wrote Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath (1982), in which he argued that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and top government officials knew in advance that Japan planned to attack the United States but did nothing about it because they wanted war with Japan. It was a position that drew much criticism from historians and journalists.

Toland once said he considered his histories to be drama and he tried to remove himself from the storytelling and let the characters act on their own. He traveled extensively to gather personal accounts and see the places where the history took place.

Toland wanted to become a playwright. When he was 14 years old, a playwright had  come to live in his family's home. He was greatly impressed and decided that would be his career. In his senior year in college, he managed a student book store and saved up more than $5,000 to go to Yale Drama School. While he was working he was offered a job by a man from Esso, the oil company (later Exxon), to become a junior executive with a good salary and go to the South Pacific. He refused the offer and the Esso man was incredulous. "What a waste of talent," he said.

Later Toland liked to tell people he made all that money so he could write, not because he liked to make money. "Otherwise, I might have eventually become head of Exxon. Wouldn't that be terrible?"

Toland's early career as a writer was dismal. He wrote 25 plays, six novels and 100 short stories. None of them was ever published. In 1954, he finally sold a short story to American Magazine for $165.

His first published book, Ships in the Sky (1957), was about dirigibles, including the ill-fated Hindenburg, the German passenger airship that caught fire and was destroyed at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. Toland interviewed survivors and presented a harrowing account of the accident in his book.

Robert Sherwood won four Pulitzers

Robert Sherwood

It is the birthday of playwright Robert Sherwood (1896), who won four Pulitzer Prizes, the first one for Idiot's Delight (1936), an anti-war piece about a group of international travelers trapped in an Alpine hotel as war breaks out. It starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Later Sherwood adapted it as a movie starring Clark Gable and Norma Shearer. Much of Sherwood's early work had anti-war themes, including his first play, The Road to Rome (1927), a comedy about Hannibal's disastrous invasion of Rome. Sherwood wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940). By 1940, Sherwood became decidedly patriotic. He supported the war against Germany, and he wrote a play, There Shall Be No Night (1940), about the Russian invasion of Finland, which won a Pulitzer in 1941. He became a speechwriter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He wrote about that experience in his book Roosevelt and Hopkins (1949), which also won a Pulitzer. His play Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1939) also won the award. Sherwood was an original member of the Algonquin Round Table and was close friends with Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker as well as Edna Ferber. After World War II, Sherwood wrote the screenplay for The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), about three servicemen returning to civilian life. He received an Oscar for best screenplay.