Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State
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| Author | Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (Miss.) |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | American Guide Series |
| Subject | Mississippi |
| Genre | Travel guide |
| Publisher | Viking Press |
Publication date | May 1938 |
| Pages | 545 |
Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State is a 1938 travel guide and cultural survey of Mississippi compiled and written by the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Published by Viking Press in New York, it is one of 48 state volumes in the American Guide Series, a Depression-era federal program that employed writers, researchers, and photographers to document the United States.[1]
The 545-page volume covers the state's history, agriculture, industry, cities, architecture, folkways, and natural landscape. It includes photographs, maps, and a folding map in a rear pocket. The book includes contributions from Mississippi writers associated with the Southern Agrarian movement, including William Alexander Percy and John Gould Fletcher, and photographs by Eudora Welty, who was then an unknown WPA photographer before her career as a fiction writer.[2]
Background
The Federal Writers' Project was established in 1935 as part of the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency created during the Great Depression to provide employment for millions of Americans. The FWP's largest project was the American Guide Series, which produced guidebooks for each of the 48 states, along with regional and city guides. In a 1961 article in American Quarterly, Daniel M. Fox called the series "the biggest, fastest and most original research job in the history of the world."[1]
The Mississippi volume was sponsored by the Mississippi Advertising Commission and first published in May 1938.[1] It was one of the earlier volumes in the series and was compiled during 1937, a period when Mississippi was still largely rural and agricultural, with an economy dependent on cotton, timber, and river commerce.[1]
Content and structure
The book is organized into several major sections typical of the American Guide Series format: an introduction to the state as a whole, detailed descriptions of cities and towns, essays on history and culture, and automobile tours of the state.
The volume opens with a foreword by the Mississippi writer William Alexander Percy. The introductory sections cover the state's geography, climate, history, and population. Subsequent chapters describe Mississippi's cities, including Jackson, Vicksburg, Natchez, Greenville, and Hattiesburg, with numbered points of interest keyed to maps.
The book includes essays on Mississippi's agriculture (primarily cotton, corn, and livestock), industry (lumber, textiles, and river shipping), architecture, and folkways. The section on architecture, which has been cited in preservation literature, describes building styles from frontier cabins to antebellum mansions and notes the absence of a distinct "Southern Colonial" style.[3]
The volume also includes material on the state's Native American heritage, particularly the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, and descriptions of rural life in the Delta region and the Pine Belt.
Contributors
The Federal Writers' Project employed numerous Mississippi writers, researchers, and photographers to compile the volume. The project provided work for unemployed white-collar workers, including journalists, teachers, and librarians.
Contributors included members of the Southern Agrarians group, a circle of Mississippi-associated writers and poets. William Alexander Percy, a planter and poet from Greenville, Mississippi, wrote the foreword. John Gould Fletcher, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and Allen Tate, the literary critic, were among the contributors associated with the project.[4]
The volume includes photographs by Eudora Welty, who worked as a WPA photographer in 1937, traveling across Mississippi to document rural life, farms, and small towns. She later won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Optimist's Daughter in 1973.[2] The guide includes at least three photographs attributed to Welty.
Other contributors included Lyle H. Lanier, a Mississippi-born writer and philosopher, and Herman Clarence Nixon, a sociologist and political scientist associated with the Southern Agrarians.[4]
Publication history
The first edition was published in May 1938. The original hardcover edition contains 545 pages, is illustrated with photographs and maps, and includes a folding map in a pocket inside the rear cover.
A reprint edition was issued by Viking Press in 1949. The volume has since been reprinted under the title The WPA Guide to Mississippi by Trinity University Press (2013), with a new introduction providing historical context.
Reception and legacy
Historians regard the volume as a record of the 1930s South. It captures Mississippi at a transitional moment, still largely rural and agricultural but beginning to experience the economic and social changes that accelerated during and after World War II.[1] Scholars have cited the guide in studies of Mississippi's extinct towns, agricultural history, and architectural heritage.[5][6]
The guide's descriptions of towns that have since declined or disappeared, such as Rodney, described as "a ghost river town" that died when the railroad passed it by, have been used by historians and archaeologists to locate and study extinct settlements.[5]
The volume is part of the literary output of the Federal Writers' Project, which also produced the These Are Our Lives oral history collection and the American Slave Narrative Collection.[7] It remains in print and is used by historians, preservationists, and scholars of Southern culture. Daniel M. Fox, in his 1961 American Quarterly review of the Federal Writers' Project, identified the Mississippi and North Carolina volumes as "excellent examples of the Southern contributions to The American Guide Series."[1] Tom Zoellner, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2021, discussed the Mississippi guide as part of his broader history of the WPA Guides, noting their distinctive literary qualities and their role in creating a new form of American travel writing.[7] Scott Borchert, in a 2023 article for the National Endowment for the Humanities, described the WPA state guides as fusing "the essential and the eccentric," noting their combination of practical travel information with idiosyncratic local detail.[8]
References
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Fox, Daniel M. (Spring 1961). "The Achievement of the Federal Writers' Project". American Quarterly. 13 (1): 3\u201319. JSTOR 2710508.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "The Seeing Eye: Eudora Welty as Photographer". INDY Week. Retrieved 2026-06-18.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "WPA Guide to the Magnolia State: No Such Thing as "Southern Colonial"". Preservation Mississippi. 2010-04-27. Retrieved 2026-06-18.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 "Walker Evans and the Crisis of American Capital, 1933-38" (PDF). UC San Diego. Retrieved 2026-06-18.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 "The historical geography of extinct towns in Mississippi" (PDF). University of Tennessee. 1972. Retrieved 2026-06-18.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Early History Hancock County, MS". Hancock County Historical Society. Retrieved 2026-06-18.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Zoellner, Tom (2021-07-04). "The WPA Guides as a Literary School". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 2026-06-18.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Borchert, Scott (2023). "How WPA State Guides Fused the Essential and the Eccentric". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2026-06-18.
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