The field research of many Federal Writers—including Nelson Algren, above—influenced their subsequent fiction. Passages in Algren’s “A Walk on the Wild Side” echo his interview with a Chicago prostitute. Mari Thomasi, who collected life stories of Vermont granite carvers, based her novel “Like Lesser Gods” on that experience. Sam Ross, who interviewed jazz musicians, wrote “Windy City,” a novel that describes the Chicago music scene as he knew it as a Federal Writer in the 1930s.
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