The approximately 172,000 film negatives and transparencies in the Library of Congreee's collection from the Farm Security Admininstration, later the Office of War Information, provide a unique of Amwerican life during the Great Depression and World War II. The government photography project, headed by Roy E. Stryker, emplyed many relatively unknown names who later became some of the twentieth-century's best-known pgotographers, such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, and Carl Mydans. Initially conceived to document government loans to farmenrs and their subsequent resettlement in surburban communities, the projected expanded to create a visual record of aricultural workers across the United States. Later Stryker's photographs recorded both rural and urban centers as the nation prepared for World War II. Each volume in the Fields of Vision series features an introduction to the work of a single FSA photographer by a leading contemporary author or writer, and presents fifty striking images that show how the particular vision of these photographers helped shaped the collective identity of America. Their evocative pictures ptransport the viewer to American homes, farms, and streets of the 1930s and 1940s, while offering a glimpse of a new narrative and intimate style that was later to blossom on the pages of LOOK and LIFE magazines. For many Americans of pre-television age, the diversity and complexity of their country was defined by the lenses of these men and women. AUTHOR: Francine Prose is the author of thirteen books of fiction. A recipient of numerous grants and awards. She is currently president of PEN American Center. 53 colour illustrations
