What if a single government initiative could (1) create fulfilling jobs for thousands of struggling Americans, (2) help irrigate “news deserts,” (3) create apprenticeships for recent humanities graduates, (4) preserve the vanishing stories of the disadvantaged and the elderly, and (5) reassure marginalized citizens that their stories are heard and valued?

Why on earth should anybody believe that one program could ever accomplish all this? The answer’s easy:

It worked the first time.

The Depression-era Federal Writers’ Project created cheap, informative, often funny, still delightful book-length “WPA Guides” to all 48 states, as well as 40 cities, 18 regions and territories, countless counties, and other, less mappable American phenomena. After dozens of local newspapers folded, the FWP reported lifesaving news of fire and flood. And it recorded the oral histories of 10,000 Americans.

This relatively tiny program, costing 0.002 percent of the total WPA budget, also heralded a new era in American literature, which had produced only one Nobel Prize winner in the previous 40 years and proceeded to win 10 in the next 80. The Federal Writers’ Project enabled Richard Wright, with barely a high school education, to quit mucking out hospital rooms for a living and find his calling as a writer.

The Project helped start or restart a star-studded list of literary careers like Wright's, including those of Zora Neale Hurston, John Cheever, Saul Bellow, and Ralph Ellison. The last two became good friends—among innumerable otherwise hard-to-imagine interracial (and cross-partisan) friendships begun on the project.

Oh, and it helped foster the greater sense of shared national purpose that eventually helped win a world war.

With trustworthy local news and history increasingly hard to find, the time feels right for FWP 2.0. Apart from the more quantifiable benefits enumerated above, a reinvented Writers’ Project ought to (a) affirm the importance of writing as a viable non-STEM career asset, (b) champion good writing and reading as a humanizing force, (c) motivate Americans to explore the curiosities and astonishments of their own country, (d) deepen local knowledge and social cohesion, and, ultimately, (e) help reintroduce a divided nation to itself.

The 21st-Century Writers’ Project will bequeath a family portrait of where America has been, a distillation of where we are now, and a love letter to what we might yet become. And you don’t write a love letter with ChatGPT.