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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.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Royal Street - A masked ball: Between canal and esplanade; 2. St. Claude Avenue - Hard times and good children: The Lower 9th Ward - Desire - St. Roch - Bywater; 3. Esplanade Avenue - Escape routes: The Marigny - The 7th Ward - Bayou St. John; 4. Basin Street - Memory and music: Congo Square - Storyville - Tremé; 5. St. Charles Avenue - Blood and money: The Garden District - The Irish Channel - The University District - Central City; 6. Outskirts - Writing through loss.
About the author
T. R. Johnson has taught at universities in Louisville and Boston and is now a Professor of English and Weiss Presidential Fellow at Tulane University. He has written books on Lacanian psychoanalysis, the teaching of writing, and prose style and is the editor of New Orleans: A Literary History. Since the late 1990s, he has lived in the 9th Ward of New Orleans near the Mississippi River and hosted a contemporary jazz radio program.
