Book review of Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America by Scott Borchert

The primary guidebook to achieve print lined Idaho and was written by the cantankerous novelist Vardis Fisher. Fisher produced now-forgotten works resembling “Toilers of the Hills” and “In Tragic Life” that had robust reviews however poor gross sales. He was in want of an earnings, and the FWP supplied it by appointing him as its state director. There weren’t many high-quality, unemployed writers in Idaho, so Fisher did a lot of the work himself: “He purchased a Nash car and got down to log round eight thousand miles of Idaho’s roadways, and write the tour copy for the information, alone.” His authorial voice, Borchert writes, was “by turns sardonic and invigorated, often somber, however not often flat.”