Stanford Libraries presents The New Deal & The Federal Writers' Project | Selections from the Bruce and Rachel Jeffer Collection, on view May 6, 2024, through January 26, 2025, in the Peterson Gallery and Munger Rotunda, Cecil H. Green Library, Bing Wing. 

Inspired by childhood automobile trips across the U.S. with his father and a lifelong love of American history and literature, Los Angeles attorney Bruce Jeffer assembled a magnificent collection—totaling nearly two thousand titles—of the Federal Writers’ Project and related WPA and New Deal publications. He and his wife Rachel gifted it to the Stanford Libraries Department of Special Collections in 2021. 

Created as a New Deal program within the Works Progress Administration in 1935, the Federal Writers’ Project (Federal Writers’ Program 1939–1943) employed as many as six thousand writers, researchers, and editors in fifty-two state and territorial offices and produced a prodigious number of publications—including the American Guide Series, oral histories, ethnographies, collections of folklore and books for children—well over one thousand, but likely many more: the exact number is unknowable, and new discoveries have surfaced in the wake of each successive bibliography. Over sixty years, Jeffer’s passion for collecting the output of the Federal Writers’ Project and its offshoots brought him into contact with the foremost antiquarian book dealers of the day, former Writers’ Project employees, and leading collectors across the United States. With his wife Rachel, he made great use of auctions, eBay, and trades with other notable collectors and dealers. Through the decades, he searched for these publications by visiting bookstores in towns and cities around the country, directly contacting booksellers, and later maintaining a private network of like-minded collectors.

Two core influences in Jeffer’s collecting activities were his close relationship with collector Fred Board of Connecticut and collector/book dealer Arthur Scharf of Pennsylvania. Board’s own collection of the State Guides (apart from his larger FWP collection) later served as an inspiration to his great-nephew Scott Borchert, which led Borchert to write his recent excellent history of the Project, Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America (New York, 2021). Besides selling and trading, Arthur Scharf was a source of bibliographic information on the FWP publications. Like most serious collectors of the FWP, when Evanell Powell self-published her ambitious (if amateur) WPA Writers’ Publication: A complete bibliographic checklist… of items, major and minor, of the Federal Writers' Project and Program (Palm Beach, 1974), Jeffer took advantage of the information there to hunt for more titles—and to find many titles unknown to Powell, historians, and scholars. Of the over twelve hundred published FWP titles in the Jeffer collection, approximately one hundred and fifty FWP items were unknown to Powell and historians, thus representing an excellent opportunity for further research. The presence of sixteen original, unpublished FWP works adds significantly to the prospects for research in the collection. 

In collecting the often ephemeral publications that characterized the richness and diversity, as well as controversy, of the project’s output, Jeffer has been guided by a desire to document this seminal period in American history, preserve it for posterity, and make it broadly available to students and researchers. In addition to rare published items, Jeffer sought out unpublished material as well—always with an eye for unique material that, in the words of one FWP catalog, embodied the project’s mission of “presenting America to all Americans.”  His collection contains copies of a number of exceedingly scarce titles, typescripts of unpublished works, and presentation copies gifted to New Deal luminaries such as Harry L. Hopkins, as well as publications from allied agencies such as the Federal Art Project, the Museum Extension Project, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Federal Music Project.  
As demonstrated throughout the exhibit, The FWP’s lasting influence on literary and ethnographic work since the 1930s is strong, and the cultural resonance of the project continues unabated—including serving as the inspiration for a proposed twenty-first-century FWP, congressional legislation (Bill # HR 3054) introduced during the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2021 by Reps. Ted Lieu (D-CA and Stanford, B.A., B.S., '91) and Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-NM).  

The exhibition is curated by Benjamin Stone, Associate Director of Special Collections and Curator for American and British History; produced and designed by Deardra Fuzzell, Manager and Designer of Exhibitions.  Special thanks to the many colleagues in the Stanford Libraries who helped to make the exhibition possible: For their expert cataloging of books and manuscripts: Nancy Lorimer, Kay Teel, and their staff in the Metadata Department; For their assessment of materials Kristen St. John and Kimberly Kwan in Conservation Services; For his photography services Wayne Vanderkuil in the Digital Production Group; Glynn Edwards, Ann Myers, Brian Bethel, Gurudarshan Khalsa and especially Esther Wan in the Collection Services division of the Department of Special Collections, and Ben Albritton and Ever Rodriguez in Rare Books, and Tim Noakes, Leif Anderson, and Kylee Diedrich in Public Services. 

NOTE: Exhibit cases in the Peterson Gallery and Munger Rotunda are illuminated from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The exhibition is free and open to the public. Visitors are encouraged to call 650-723-0931 or visit the Library Hours page to confirm hours and access.