Pursuing "Writers, Plumbers, and Anarchists" in Massachusetts

Saturday, November 21, 2009

2:00 pm

Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library & Museum in Forbes Library, Northampton

In conjunction with the Soul of a People: Voices from the Writer's Project, you are invited to join Christine Bold as she discusses some of the secrets, surprises, and unexpected silences which she discovered in the archives of the Massachusetts Writers' Project (1935-43) while researching her book Writers, Plumbers, and Anarchists: The WPA Writers' Project in Massachusetts (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006). The press of the day routinely disparaged Project writers as "plumbers" and branded them as anarchists and subversives after the publication of the Massachusetts state guide, with its controversial passages on Sacco and Vanzetti and labour struggles. The surviving records shed new light on these controversies and offer intriguing glimpses into life as a "worker-writer" in 1930s' Massachusetts.


Christine Bold is Professor of English at the University of Guelph in Canada and author of three books--Writers, Plumbers, and Anarchists: The WPA Writers' Project in Massachusetts (2006); The WPA Guides: Mapping America (1999); and Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860-1960 (1987)--as well as numerous chapters and articles on popular culture and cultural memory. She has also coauthored the award-winning book Remembering Women Murdered by Men: Memorials across Canada (2006) by the Cultural Memory Group, a collaboration between academics and social justice workers. She is currently editing U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920 (one volume in the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture) and writing a book titled The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880-1924.