About Texas Writers' Project's WPA Dallas Guide and History

The WPA Dallas Guide and History is now available as a free e-book at the UNT Digital Library and The Portal to Texas History.

The WPA Dallas Guide and History has for five decades been a local history treasure known only to librarians and historians. Now for the first time, the general public can read this unique and informative introduction to Dallas. Written in the late 1930s and early 1940s by Dallas workers of the Writers’ Program, the Dallas Guide covers everything from local aviation to the city’s zoo. Included as well are a number of automobile tours to the points of interest in Dallas County, and what is still one of the most comprehensive histories of Dallas ever written.

When World War II prevented the publication of the Dallas Guide, the manuscript was placed in the collections of the Dallas Public Library. With its publication, The WPA Dallas Guide and History, including as it does many of the original photographs collected by the WPA staff, stands as a significant addition to the historiography of Dallas, and joins the others in the American Guide Series as a lasting legacy of the Great Depression.

“One of the most comprehensive of the WPA histories is available to the public for the first time… a distinguished work [in which] only grammatical mistakes, typographical errors, and inconsistencies were corrected.” —Southwestern Historical Quarterly

“For decades The Dallas Guide has furnished researchers significant leads to hitherto unrecorded facts from the Dallas past. Getting this material into print is a real service for the Dallas and Texas researcher.” —A. C. Greene