State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, is a compilation of fifty personal essays, written by fifty talented authors. Each piece is unique, but all strive to reach the same goal. Every single one of the fifty writers and reporters whose names are in this book wants to succeed in capturing the essence of the state he or she is writing about.  Weiland and Wilsey’s goal with State by State was to replicate the Works Progress Administration’s American Guide Series of the 1930s on a smaller, more personal scale. The Federal Writers’ project assigned over six thousand American writers, researchers, and others to put together
something that would represent America. Each state had a guide, some of which were over 500 pages, composed of essays written on all imaginable topics of that state. Weiland and Wilsey thought that 21st century America needed something similar to the Guide Series, a book that would explain America to the people who lived in it. As Weiland put it in his preface to the book, “despite drive-time radio and the nightly news and the Sunday paper, despite all the books and blog posts, the documentaries and songs, America and the lives lived here remain strangely and surprisingly under described.”

The essay I chose to focus on in State By State was Missouri, written by Jacki Lyden. In her essay, she explains Missouri to her audience by giving historical background on St. Louis, and recounting her experiences with a Bosnian man, Suki, who runs a newspaper in the state, and her trip with him to Hannibal, Missouri— the city that thrives around Mark Twain and his fiction.

While Lyden herself is not a Missourian by birth, she had been to the state before her trip where she met Suki. “I first came to St. Louis in 1985, as a young NPR reporter, there to chronicle the city’s struggle to stagger back to life”, Lyden writes. I believe that this makes Lyden very qualified to write an essay about a trip in the state; as she had experienced Missouri before, she was not completely new to the place, but she had also not grown up in Missouri, so her impartial eyes would be open to observe the state.

One of Lyden’s main points in her essay was that St. Louis was a city that had started out so full of life and slowly lost all of its excitement and enthusiasm. “Once the fourth largest city in the United States, St. Louis was a ghost of its former glory. It was as if all the descendants of its pioneers had kept going west, no longer full of adventure but frightened urban refugees, turning their backs on the city as fast as their forebears had come.” Lyden stresses the point that Missouri has so muchto offer, and yet it has not reached its highest potential since its early beginnings. “Only the architectural grand dames were left to mourn the suburban flight… though the soaring Saarinen arch at the western edge of the Mississippi River was beautiful, a 630- foot steel masterpiece, it seemed like a mocking tombstone.” Lyden also points out that “Union Station, a ninety-year old masterpiece that local residents claimed saw more traffic during WWII than Kennedy Airport on any given day, had just been refurbished for $176 million”, and then quotes loft developer Leon Strauss’s words during an interview with her: “the sense of abandonment in St. Louis is so profound, so uniquely ‘St. Louisian’ that we’re able to take over 100 acres of the Central West End without a single newspaper or radio station asking a question about it.” Lyden states that when she attended the party to open the lofts, “Almost no one came”. One can sense the bitter-sweetness of what Union Station and the Saarinen Arch represent through her descriptions. Lyden brightens the mood a bit by then going on to state how the Bosnians are helping bring the city back to its former glory.

Much of Lyden’s essay is focused on two men— Sukrija “Suki” Dzidzovic, and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). Suki and his wife and his two daughters escaped from Sarajevo after they had had enough of the siege that was going on there. (The Serbs wanted to create a new republic, and tried to take control of an area in Bosnia and Herzegovina, causing a lot of fighting). Lyden introduces Suki first, by giving background information on Bosnian immigrants in St. Louis. “Refugees of religious and ethnic persecution have helped make St. Louis grown again… St. Louis is now home to approximately fifty thousand Bosnians— the biggest Bosnian population outside Bosnia itself.” Suki is their “unofficial spokesman”. Lyden then goes on to describe Suki, saying that he “speaks with the confidence of Dale Carnegie, Charles Atlas and Donald Trump”. Suki is not afraid to say what is on his mind, and he is fearless when it comes to doing what he thinks is right: “I like to break the rules… I feel bad when I comply with them, when things are too normal… There was a police car in middle lane and people in front of me didn’t like to pass him. I pass police car and look at him and he look at me. He put his lights on. My wife turned to me and said, ‘You are crazy.’ I say, I am individual. Here is supposed to be country of individuals.”

Lyden focuses on Mark Twain to capture Missouri’s essence, when Suki and she visit the city of Hannibal, his hometown. “There are, one must admit, far too many businesses in Hannibal using the name Mark Twain, from a ready-mix concrete company to a counseling center.” Suki already has a great impression of the legendary author. “When Suki was a boy in military school in Sarajevo, he read Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer… he remembered the hiding in a cave, the sense of heroism for a young boy, the liberation of a slave, and being part of something important. ‘It was a story to show boys they could be something positive’, he says.”

Then Lyden and Suki enter the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum, where the curator shows the two the home. Certain things catch Suki’s publisher’s eye, including “a typical type of box of the time… you would have to arrange all that moveable type with a justifying stick. Suki looked wan at the thought”. Most importantly though, Suki notices a “…tiny stove in the Clemens’s parlor. ‘Just like a sheet metal one I made from cans of peppers in Sarajevo… in which we could burn the furniture when we were under siege’”.

Together, Clemens and Suki represent Missouri as well as is possible. Clemens represents the Missouri that we know today. We know Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer and farming and segregation. Suki represents the Missouri that people will know in the future. They will know about Suki and Bosnian immigrants who helped the state of Missouri become again what it was back in Clemens’s time. “’My newspaper exists because I am selling ads, but do you think it is Bosnian community that supports me the most? No. It’s the Americans. They’re the ones who advertise… There are maybe 200 or 300 small business owners in Bosnia’s St. Louis community. They read the paper and pass it on. But the Americans. They advertise. Right now, only six out of the paper’s fifty- two pages are in English, but someday will be 100 percent English’”, says Suki. Lyden successfully uses the parallels in Suki, who embodies the hope of a thriving Missouri, and Twain, who symbolizes the once-flourishing Missouri of earlier days, to portray the state to her readers.