New Orleans City Guide

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 the city. Remarkably, many of the sites and attractions the WPA chronicled in 1938 are still around today.

The Federal Writers' Project was a New Deal program created in 1935, during the Great Depression, to put unemployed writers back to work. Its signature achievement was the American Guide Series, a sweeping set of travel guides documenting the history, culture, and character of the United States, region by region and city by city. Writers fanned out across the country to chronicle individual states, towns, and neighborhoods, capturing local life with a depth no commercial publisher had attempted. The New Orleans City Guide, first published in 1938, was among the series' standouts, a richly detailed portrait of the city's streets, customs, and culture. Lawrence N. Powell is professor emeritus of history at Tulane University and a founding member of the Louisiana Coalition against Racism and Nazism.