An East St Louis Anthology

Comprised of facsimile reproductions of excerpts from: History of East St. Louis, by Robert A. Tyson (1875); Saint Louis : the future great city of the world, by Logan Reavis (1876); History of St. Clair County, Illinois (1881); Historical encyclopedia of Illinois, and, History of St. Clair County (1907); Standard atlas of St. Clair County, Illinois (1901); Directory of the city of East St. Louis, St. Clair County, Illinois (1893); East St. Louis directory (1887); Ordinances of the city of East St. Louis, St. Clair County, Illinois (1884).

St. Louis is undoubtedly fragmented, physically so in that the city is dissected by rivers, highways, walls, and fences; but also in a more insidious way. It's a city (like many) where race, class, religion, and zip code might as well be cards in a rigged poker game, where the winners' prize is the ability to ignore that the losers have drastically shorter life expectancies. But it's also a city of warmth, love, and beauty--especially in its contrasts. The St. Louis Anthology dares to confront the city's nostalgia and its trauma, celebrating those who face faced both, living complex and nuanced lives in this city against a backdrop of its red brick, muddy rivers, and sticky summer nights when the symphony of cicadas and jazz is almost loud enough to drown out the gunshots. Edited by Ryan Schuessler, featuring nearly 70 pieces penned by St. Louis writers, journalists, clergy, poets, and activists including Aisha Sultan, Galen Gritts, Vivian Gibson, Maja Sadikovic, Nartana Premachandra, Sophia Benoit, Robert Langellier, Samuel Autman, Umar Lee, and more.

The third edition of this anthology has been substantially revised and updated for a contemporary American audience; a selection of classic essays from earlier eras has been retained, but the emphasis is very much on twenty-first-century expository writing. Works of different lengths and levels of difficulty are represented, as are narrative, descriptive and persuasive essays—and, new to this edition, lyric essays. For the new edition there are also considerably more short pieces than ever before; a number of op-ed pieces are included, as are pieces from blogs and from online news sources. The representation of academic writing from several disciplines has been increased—and in some cases the anthology also includes news reports presenting the results of academic research to a general audience. Also new to this edition are essays from a wide range of the most celebrated essayists of the modern era—from James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and Annie Dillard to Eula Biss and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The anthology remains broad in its thematic coverage, but certain themes receive special emphasis—notably, issues of race, class, and culture in twenty-first century America. For the new edition the headnotes have been expanded, providing students with more information as to the context in which each piece was written. Questions and suggestions for discussion have been moved online to the instructor website.

“St. Louis gets a turn to show its dark side . . . [A] spirited, black-hearted collection” including a story from New York Times–bestselling author John Lutz (Kirkus Reviews). A vibrant Midwest metropolis, St. Louis has a rich, multicultural history of art and literature—both high and low. That duality is embraced here in an anthology that spans the reaches of noir, from violent criminality to bad luck and bad attitudes. St. Louis Noir includes stories by bestselling authors John Lutz and Scott Phillips, a poetic interlude featuring Poet Laureate Michael Castro, and more tales from Calvin Wilson, LaVelle Wilkins-Chinn, Paul D. Marks, Colleen J. McElroy, Jason Makansi, S.L. Coney, Laura Benedict, Jedidiah Ayres, Umar Lee, Chris Barsanti, and L.J. Smith. “The stories here are uniformly strong. Regular readers of the Noir series know what to expect: tightly written, tightly plotted, mostly character-driven stories of murder and mayhem, death and despair, shadow and shock.” —Booklist “Thirteen tales of grim homicidal happenings (plus one poetic interlude) set in the streets of the St. Louis area.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

This collection of fiction and poetry, memoirs and autobiography, history and journalism illuminates the African American experience in St. Louis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Examines the processes of compostion, learning, and performance used by Southern black folk blues singers.

Complementing the new permanent exhibition at the Missouri Historical Society, this anthology gathers over three centuries of writings on St. Louis by 100 individuals who have been inspired to describe the physical and cultural essence of this region. The volume contains excerpted selections from all genres--travel diaries, poetry, fiction, journalism, drama, and rare out-of-print and previously unpublished archival material--including poems by Angus Umphraville, from the first volume of verse published west of the Mississippi, and newspaper articles by Theodore Dreiser when he was a beat reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Other compelling excerpts were authored by such notables as Auguste Chouteau, Charles Dickens, William Wells Brown, William T. Sherman, Sara Teasdale, T. S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Fanny Hurst, William S. Burroughs, Miles Davis, Nzotake Shange, John Lutz, Carl Phillips, and Quincy Troupe. A biographical introduction precedes each entry to place the author and the excerpt in the proper historical context. The content of Seeking St. Louis was enriched by the involvement of several of the St. Louis area's foremost literary experts--Robert Boyd, Jan Garden Castro, Gerald Early, Wayne Fields, and Karen Goering--who served as contributing editors.