David Taylor writes about revealing connections between people and their worlds. He has written for award-winning documentaries, and his articles have appeared in Smithsonian, The Washington Post, The Village Voice, Outside, The Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere.

His new book Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America, will be featured on CSPAN's BookTV on Sunday, July 5. The book explores the America found in the 1930s by the unlikely recruits of WPA writers. Click here to download a chapter. Read about the twists and turns of friendships from the Project in The American Scholar.

Read about Soul of a People on the lit blog of reviewer Mark Athitakis, as well as in the Charlotte Observer and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

Listen to David's NPR interview with Jacki Lyden on All Things Considered. Watch his short interview about art and democracy on The Book Studio. Or download his interview with Jean Dean on ESPN in West Virginia here. Read recent articles here.

Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America(Wiley & Sons) is about a handful of people who were on the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s and a glimpse of America at a turning point. They were caught up in an effort to describe America in a series of WPA travel guides. Through striking images and firsthand accounts, Soul of a People reveals their experiences and the most vivid excerpts from selected guides and interviews: Harlem schoolchildren, truckers, Chicago fishmongers, Cuban cigar makers, a Florida midwife, and Nebraskan meatpackers.

This book and the documentary film illuminate what it felt like to live that experience, how going from joblessness to reporting on their communities affected artists with varied visions, as well as what feelings such a passage involved: shame humiliation, anger, excitement, nostalgia, and adventure. 

"A wonderful and engaging book." - Robert Whitaker, author of On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation

“Long before Oprah and blogs, the WPA during the Great Depression of the 1930s gave America its first mass exercise in reading and writing – the Federal Writers Project. Now David Taylor goes inside the project to give us intimate snapshots of the writers and what they saw and felt during that hard time. Soul of a People is a revealing and a valuable resource.” - Nick Taylor, author of American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA

"An unmatched collective portrait of a people battered but not beaten by the Great Depression. Soul of a People should be mandatory reading as the storm clouds of hard times hover over us again."
- Bernard Weisberger, editor of The WPA Guide to America

"David Taylor's Soul of a People is a vivid reminder of two things: the creative power of America's government at its best and the remarkable richness and diversity of America's people." - Geoffrey C. Ward, author of The War

"Soul of a People is an excellent study of the personalities behind the Federal Writers’ Project... Some of the participants later became very well-known...but as the book makes clear, doing government work left many of the writers feeling conflicted, and the project was consistently under scrutiny by Congress for potentially harboring Communists, a hint of the McCarthy hearings that would come years later." - Mark Athitakis, American Fiction Notes

Praise for Ginseng, the Divine Root:

"Adventurous." —Booklist

A "fascinating tour... a master storyteller." —Library Journal

"An engaging cultural history." —The Brooklyn Eagle

"An excellent job. I would highly recommend this book ... reminds me of Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma" —Herbalgram

"An intelligent, wide-ranging account." —Publishers Weekly

"Ginseng, the Divine Root is one of those rare works that remind us what an endlessly surprising place the world is..." —The Boston Globe

"Taylor has a gift for capturing the colorful characters along his journey. Ginseng, the Divine Root chronicles ... much about this plant and even more about human nature." —Orion

"One of the most fascinating garden-oriented books I’ve read." —London Free Press

"Like John McPhee, Taylor has the ability to turn nonfiction into a story with many plot turns and surprises... [A]fter reading this book, you’ll scan the forest floor a bit more diligently." —Winston-Salem Journal

"Taylor knits these diverse aspects of the plant’s influence, as well as his visits to ginseng haunts, into a charged historical narrative his book approaches having as powerful an effect on the imagination as that strange, puckered root." —American Geographical Society