These titles are mostly first-person accounts of life in Chicago collected during the Great Depression. The WPA project categories include: BELIEFS AND CUSTOMS and FOLKLORE.
Subjects include: OCCUPATIONS, including newsboys, cab drivers, postal workers, sign painters, bartenders, sailors, meat packers (women in meat plants) and steelworkers; LOCAL HISTORY, including the Chicago Fire and Hull House; MUSIC, including jazz, blues and vaudeville; FOLKLORE, including children's rhymes, superstititions, ghost/devil stories; and VICES, including gambling and con games.
Interviews were conducted by project workers Abe Aaron, Nelsen Algren, Betty Burke, Jack Conroy, Garnet L. Eskew, Frank Heiner, Grace Outlaw, Alfred O. Phillip, Hilda Polacheck, Jerome W. Power, Sam Ross, Ona Spencer, J. D. Stradling and Margaret Walker.