The United States government hired over six thousand writers to create guidebooks about each state’s history. This project, the WPA American State Guide Series of the Federal Writers’ Project was produced in the 1930s. Some of the finest writers in the nation researched for hours about their state. In the end, each state had its own guide about their history, some over five hundred pages long. The guides were about such things as public transportation, industries, agriculture, and the arts, whether it be theatre, basket weaving, or Mardi Gras costume making. This project was long, original, and it had its own place in history. Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey were determined to rewrite the history for every state but this time, they wanted something more profound, personal, and more eccentric. They didn’t want any partisan arguments; they wanted “the good, the bad, and the ugly” from fifty different writers on all fifty distinct states. They didn’t want a list of facts; they wanted “a rowdy, idealistic, sometimes farcical experiment… that refuses to be forgotten”.
Let me introduce two fine writers among the fifty chosen to author essays for the book: Joe Sacco and Jack Hitt, the authors of Oregon and South Carolina, respectively. Joe Sacco was born in Malta, Europe on October 2nd 1960. At the age of one he moved to Australia where he spent his childhood, until 1972, when the family moved to Los Angeles. Then, he began his journalism studies in Beaverton, Oregon. Three years later in 1981, Sacco earned his bachelor degree of art in journalism from the University of Oregon. Later in his career, he found his work to have “no interesting pieces that would really make some sort of difference”. So he decided to move back to Malta to continue his hobby, cartooning. Eventually, he moved back to the U.S again, in 1984. In the following year, he found a job at the Comics Journal in Portland, Oregon. He was also very interested in traveling and in 1988 he left the U.S and went to Europe. In 1996, he wrote and illustrated the famous American award-winning book Palestine. Joe Sacco currently resides in Portland, Oregon. When Sacco wrote his story, he divulged both his passion for the state and the state itself. His focus, preferring anecdotal to panoramic, excavates details that infrequently make it to the news or the history books. For example, in Oregon, it rains a lot. It’s rather simple to just say, “Oregon is a beautiful country and it rains a lot”. But the way he tells us that it rains a lot is more indirect. He gives many examples, implying constant showers. For example, Sacco tells us that there is a place that’s full of peril called the Pearl District. He uses an umbrella to protect himself from being jumped. And when he has to walk his awful embarrassing creature, the dog, he sometimes waits 20 minutes when there are clouds in the sky. Sacco also dislikes the heat. And when it’s too hot, his wife, Amalie, would want her tomatoes to receive hard heat for anther five or six days. Sacco thinks that it is unquestionably essential for a good writer to travel in various places and it is also ideal for him to visualize something when he’s walking around.
How about we talk about the splendiferous writer, Jack Hitt? Although he is a great writer, it was difficult to get his full biography, at present. He was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, and attended Porter-Gaud School. During his teens, he produced some of the finest haiku in Charleston. He regularly contributes to the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and This American Life. In 1990, he received the Livingston Award for national coverage. One of Hitt’s more popular stories on This American Life was about a production of Peter Pan in an episode named “Fiasco”. Other piece includes his experiences growing up with transgender woman, named Dawn. Even another episode he created was about his life in a New York apartment building in which his superintendent turned out to be the head of a death squad in Brazil. He won the Peabody award (the highest award in American journalism), in 2007. He is currently working with the national New Zealand radio.
Hitt seems to be very affected by architecture, and reveals much about the city of Charleston, SC, in his essay. “Charleston’s physical beauty comes from being an entire collection of modest, lovely things. Street after street of regular residences with side piazzas and old longleaf pine clapboarding painted so many times that south of Broad is a fusion of antique textures, mottled bricks, tilted walls, comfortably settled foundations, sagging shutters, rusting earthquake rods, and shimmering old panes of glass.” Yes, Charlestonians were not able to spend massive amounts of money on their city, but after Hurricane Hugo hit, it seems as if Charlestonians knew exactly what to do. The real fact is they had money, and lots of it. “Now Charleston was on the receiving end of all that insurance and federal money [FEMA]. Within a year, the town was more spruced up than it had been since Benjamin Franklin started a newspaper there… the number of super-wealthy software jockeys and corporate chieftains who wanted to own a ‘Charleston house’ overwhelmed downtown.” The conclusion was that subsequent to the hurricane, a colossal amount of money was acquired by the Charlestonians for rebuilding, and rebuild they did, which completely overpowered the old Charleston, and forced poor families to move.
There are 49 other authors (Washington D.C. has an essay too) in State by State and this is a profile of just two. Overall, State by State was an entirely new rebuild of the Federal’s Writers Project and each essay was thoroughly written by prestigious authors who carried out the true inner essence of the state assigned.