The Federal Writers Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) not only provided jobs and income to writers during the Depression, it created for America an astounding series of detailed and richly evocative guides, recounting the stories and histories of the 48 states (plus THE Alaska Territory and Puerto Rico) and many of the country’s major cities. David Kipen has written the introductions to reissues of the WPA guides to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. He is Southern California Public Radio's book correspondent, and the founder of a lending library/used book store east of Downtown Los Angeles called Libros Schmibros. Past book editor/critic of the San Francisco Chronicle and director of literature at the National Endowment for the Arts—where he led the Big Read initiative Kipen is the author of The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History, and the translator of Cervantes’ The Dialogue of the Dogs.