Gets bogged down by Mangione's over abundant love of juicy gossip about Writer's Project staff, but at first it's fascinating. And the gossip does tell a story: about the utterly quixotic idea of a state bureaucracy employing a lot of dissolute, highly individualistic, egotistical, wayward souls to work on a collective project that marvelously, in its short lifetime, actually largely succeeded in both chronicling and creating the culture of its time. ( )