During the Great Depression, the Works Process Administration financed a series of 500-page travel guides, one for each state, to support out-of-work writers, researchers, and photographers. The resulting volumes were the fruits of a monumental collective effort, featuring the work of more than six thousand authors, including Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright. Perhaps it is a sign of the the times that in today’s recession, the updated version features only fifty writers, and is a private enterprise. But with writing from George Packer, Benjamin Kunkel, Dave Eggers, Heidi Julavits, Louise Erdrich, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Joshua Ferris, State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America is still a collection of America’s best and brightest. Don’t expect to find route suggestions and hotel recommendations between these covers, however. Sean Wilsey, who edited the book with Matt Weiland, prefers to see it as a “collective memoir about what it means to be an American.” For Jonathan Franzen, this means bemoaning the loss of the imagined New York of his youth; for Alison Bechdel, it’s the discovery that liberalism is alive and well and living in Vermont; for David Rakoff, it’s a trip back through the history of Mormonism in Utah while searching Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson’s legendary work of land art in the Great Salt Lake. In the end, State by State is less about our fifty states than about its fifty authors, but with a cast like this, maybe that’s for the best.

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America is out today from Ecco.

Image courtesy of Ecco

KEYWORDS: America, anthologies, books

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