New Orleans
A Writer's City
Author(s): T. R. Johnson
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The neighborhoods of New Orleans have given rise to an extraordinary outpouring of important writing. Over the last century and a half or so, these stories and songs have given the city its singular place in the human imagination. This book leads the reader along five thoroughfares that define these different parts of town – Royal, St. Claude, Esplanade, Basin, and St. Charles – to explore how the writers who have lived around them have responded in closely related ways to the environments they share. On the outskirts of New Orleans today, the city's precarious relation to its watery surroundings and the vexed legacies of race loom especially large. But the city's literature shows us that these themes have been near to hand for New Orleans writers for several generations, whether reflected through questions of masquerade, dreams of escape, the innocence of children, or the power of money or of violence or of memory.
- Organizes the recent literary history of the city by neighborhoods and particular blocks of streets, allowing readers to navigate the city in the most literal sense through its most important and most inspired writing.
- Brings together relatively remote historical territories with up-to-the minute contemporary developments. Readers will be able to engage contemporary and future phenemona in the city with a rich grasp of their deep roots.
- Offers some fifty images plus some thirty textboxes to create keen visual interest across its pages.