The seventeenth-century migration to New England-twenty thousand people-was great because the Puritans thought it was great, and said so every time they got within ten paces of a pulpit: I am founding a city on a hill, a beacon unto the world! I am leading an errand into the wilderness! The twentieth-century migration from the Cotton Belt was great in numbers, but whether it was great for the people who made it was something to wonder about.

That man in Eddie’s Bar, who left Jacksonville, Florida, at the beginning of the First World War, was part of what historians call the Great Migration, which can be confusing, because historians also talk about the Great Migration of Puritans who left England between 16. I’m in New York, but New York ain’t in me, understand what I mean?” In “Invisible Man,” which won the National Book Award when it was published, in 1952, an old woman, up from the South, saves Ellison’s narrator, a newer arrival, after he collapses on Lenox Avenue, telling him, “You have to take care of yourself, son.

He wanted to turn “the streets, the stockyards, and the hiring halls into literature.” From more than ten thousand interviews, the Writers’ Project produced some eight hundred books, including “A Treasury of American Folklore” and, in 1939, a volume called “These Are Our Lives.” That’s not counting the novels, though, which is where a lot of those interviews wound up. The project’s folklore editor, Benjamin Botkin, had a mad, beautiful vision. They also reinvented the interview and changed American journalism forever. But, before that, Ellison and all those thousands of other writers chronicled American life by interviewing ordinary people. (At the time, one in four people in publishing was out of work.) It was mired in bureaucracy and inefficiency, you had to take a pauper’s oath to get hired, and the whole thing was axed, four years after it got started, by people in Congress who were convinced it was a Communist front.

At its peak, the W.P.A.’s Federal Writers’ Project employed more than six thousand writers-from newspaper reporters to playwrights, anybody who used to make some kind of living by writing and couldn’t anymore-including Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, John Cheever, and Richard Wright. He was asking because it was his job to ask: he was muddling through the Depression on a paycheck from the Works Progress Administration, which people liked to call the Whistle, Piss, and Argue department but which was something to do, anyway, and better than the dole. Ellison took all that down, on a nice neat form.

Isabel wilkerson the great migration