59 pages • 1 hour read
Annie BarrowsThe Truth According to Us
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Annie Barrows
Annie Barrows was born in 1962 in San Diego, California. Her family moved to the small town of San Anselmo, California, when Barrows was a baby. She developed a love for literature as a child, resembling the bookish Willa in spending all her free time in the local public library, where, as a teenager, she worked part-time.
Barrows graduated with a BA in medieval history from the University of California-Berkeley and then worked in educational publishing for several years. She earned an MA in creative writing at Mills College in 1996. Her first publications were nonfiction texts for adults, but she soon became interested in writing for children. She has written numerous children’s books, including the award-winning Ivy and Bean and the Iggy series.
Barrows was a well-established children’s writer when she was contacted by her aunt, Mary Anne Schaffer, a librarian and editor whose first novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, had been provisionally accepted for publication. As the publishers required major rewriting and Schaffer’s health was rapidly failing, Barrows finished her aunt’s novel as a co-author. Like The Truth According to Us, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society (2008) tells the story of a young female historian who chronicles events in a small community. The novel reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list in 2009.
Historical Context: The Federal Writers’ Project
The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) was launched during the Great Depression as part of the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency that provided employment for millions of jobseekers in public works projects. Employing around 10,000 writers, librarians, researchers, and archivists, the FWP aimed to collectively produce a “self-portrait” of the nation. The project published guidebooks as well as ethnographic and anthropological studies of local communities and their customs. The resulting publications were unprecedented both in the attention they paid to the cultural heterogeneity of the various states and in their inclusion of texts and narratives by African Americans. The Virginia Negro Studies Project employed 16 African American writers to produce a collection entitled The Negro of Virginia. The Slave Narrative Collection included over 2,000 first-person accounts of slavery.
This inclusive vision was not received kindly by conservatives, especially in areas of the American South that were still smarting from the Civil War—a situation that Barrows portrays in the fictional town of Macedonia, West Virginia. The FWP also came under attack for its often sympathetic portrayal of strikes and the activities of trade unions, another issue that is dramatized in The Truth According to Us. From 1938, the House Un-American Activities Committee unsuccessfully but enthusiastically pursued allegations that the project was in the hands of Soviet-funded trade unions. The FWP folded permanently in 1943 when its funding was cut after America entered World War II.
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