Seeking St. Louis
Voices from a River City, 1670-2000
Distributed for Missouri Historical Society Press
Seeking St. Louis
Voices from a River City, 1670-2000
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selections from all genres—travel diaries, poetry, fiction, journalism, drama, and rare out-of-print and previously unpublished archival material—including poems by Angus Umphraville, from the first volume of verse published west of the Mississippi, and newspaper articles by Theodore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.
1,088 pages | 6 x 9.25 | © 2000
History: General History
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory

Table of Contents
Foreword
Lee Ann Sandweiss
Preface
Eric Sandweiss
Introduction
Père Jacques Marquette
Marquette's First Voyage
Auguste Chouteau
Narrative of the Settlement of St. Louis
Fernando De Leyba
Account of the Battle of Fort San Carlos
Nicolas De Finiels
from An Account of Upper Louisiana
Amos Stoddard and Meriwether Lewis
Address to the People of Upper Louisiana
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
from The Journals of Lewis and Clark
Hannah Lewis
from Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Hannah Lewis
Rose Philippine Duchesne
Letters, 1818-1852
Angus Umphraville
Lines Written on the Bank of the Mississippi
The Old Maid of St. Louis
The Affair of St. Louis
Gotteried Duden
from Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America
Wilson Primm
History of St. Louis
Ballad of the Year of the Surprise
Matthew C. Field
Diary entries
The Chouteau House
Charles Dickens
from American Notes
Joseph M. Field
Death of Mike Fink
Charles Lanman
from A Summer in the Wilderness
William Wells Brown
from Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself
Anonymous
A Night View of Our Courthouse
Henry Boernstein
from The Mysteries of St. Louis
Adolphus M. Hart
from Life in the Far West; or, The Comical, Quizzical, and Tragical Adventures of a Hoosier
Henry Lewis
The Great Fire in St. Louis
Elizabeth Keckley
from Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House
James Thomas
St. Louis on the Eve of War
William Tecumseh Sherman
from Memoirs of Gen. W. T. Sherman, Written by Himself
Jessie Benton Fremont
from Souvenirs of My Time
Anthony Trollope
Missouri
Auguste Laugel
from Les Etats-Unis Pendant La Guerre Civile, 1861-1865
Francis Grierson
The Planters' House
Solomon Franklin Smith
A Hung Jury
A Lapse of Twenty Years
Anne Lucas Hunt
Early Recollections
John Henton Carter
from The Log of Commodore Rollingpin: His Adventures Afloat and Ashore
Ernst Von Hesse-Wartegg
from Travels on the Lower Mississippi, 1879-1880
Henry Shaw
A Guide to the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis
Logan Uriah Reavis
from St. Louis the Future Great City of the World: and Its Impending Triumph
Rebecca Morrow Reavis
The Future Great City of the World
Ode to Captain James B. Eads
Joseph Pulitzer
Journalism from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Mark Twain
from Life on the Mississippi
Nicolaus Mohr
from Excursion Through America
Orrick Johns
from Time of Our Lives: The Story of My Father and Myself
Theodore Dreiser
from A Book About Myself
Journalism from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and St. Louis Republic
Kate Chopin
from At Fault
The Maid of Saint Phillippe
Elizabeth Stock's One Story
William Marion Reedy
What's the Matter with St. Louis?
Winston Churchill
from The Crisis
Claude H. Wetmore
Tweed Days in St. Louis
Henry Adams
from The Education of Henry Adams
Marietta Holley
from Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition
Edward Garner Lewis
Ten Million Women
The Potter's Wheel
Her America by Edna Wahlert
Rolla Wells
The Statue of St. Louis
Leo A. Landau
from The Big Cinch
Sara Teasdale
The River
Sunset, St. Louis
Red Maples
Red Birds
Eugene Field and Thomas Woods Stevens
A Western Boy's Lament
Little Mack
Plaint of the Missouri 'Coon in the Berlin Zoological Gardens
Thomas Woods Stevens and Percy MacKaye
from The Pageant of St. Louis
from St. Louis: A Civic Masque
Carlos F. Hurd
St. Louis Post-Dispatch account of East St. Louis riots
Denton Snider
from The St. Louis Movement
Charles A. Lindergh
from The Spirit of St. Louis
T. S. Eliot
letter to Edna McCourt
letter to St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The Dry Salvages
W. E. B. Du Bois
Of Work and Wealth
A. E. Hotchner
from King of the Hill
Maya Angelou
from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Thomas Wolfe
from The Lost Boy
Sally Benson
from Meet Me in St. Louis
Miles Davis
from Miles: The Autobiography
Fannie Cook
from Mrs. Palmer's Honey
Peter Taylor
The Little Cousins
Dick Gregory
from Nigger: An Autobiography
Harold Brodkey
The State of Grace
Fannie Hurst
St. Louis
from Anatomy of Me
Herman Dreer
from The Tie That Binds: A Novel of a Youth Who Seeks to Understand Life
Charles Guenther
Arch
Three Sisters
Union Station
William S. Burroughs
St. Louis Return
Jay Landesman
Running Dry/Running Off
John Knoepfle
Lines for Men of the Greater Interior
Riverfront, St. Louis
St. Louis Midday
St. Louis Midnight
Herman Avenue Holiday
East St. Louis
June Night on the River
Howard Nemerov
One Moment in Eternity
Walking Down Westgate in the Fall
Ginkgoes in Fall
An Ending
By Al Lebowitz's Pool
Tennessee Williams
from Memoirs
from A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur
Stanley Elkin
Why I Live Where I Live
Constance Urdang
To Live with a Landscape
Ways of Returning
The River
At Frank 'n' Helen's
Jonathan Raban
Marriage à la Mode
Ntozake Shange
from Betsey Brown
Glenn Savan
from White Palace
Michael Castro
The Origins of River Styx
Jonathan Franzen
from The Twenty-Seventh City
John Lutz
from Dancer's Debt
Kathleen Finneran
New Houses
Eugene B. Redmond
Honoring the Female Olympian of the Century
Wedge Wall, Huge Hand
Carryover
River of Bones and Flesh and Blood
Mona van Duyn
The Block
Addendum to "The Block"
"We Are in Your Area"
Donald Finkel
Headwaters
What's In a Name
An Entirely New Idea
For Whose Use
Allen Steele
from The Jericho Iteration
William H. Gass
Mississippi
Michael A. Kahn
from Due Diligence
John Keene
from Annotations
David Carkeet
Sunday Morning Ball at the J
Eddy L. Harris
from Still Life in Horlem
Laurell K. Hamilton
from The Lunatic Cafe
Gerald Early
St. Louis: The Midwestern Long Good-bye
David Haynes
from All American Dream Dolls
Carter Revard
Dragon-watching in St. Louis
Family Reunion
Carl Phillips
The Flume
Meditation: The River Road
Wayne Fields
Our Cruel, Tangled Past
Brian Taylor
At the Marjeanette Apartments
Route 64
Mr. Henry Shaw Comes to Rest
Spring
Quincy Troupe
Listening to Miles
Acknowledgements
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