Literary History

T.R. Johnson, professor of English at Tulane, is editor of New Orleans: A Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which provides detailed discussions on the most significant writing the city of New Orleans has inspired. In a video on the publisher’s website, he mentions several major authors like Joan Didion, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Kate Chopin who spent time in the city. “I think people come in and spend a few months or even a few years and put their ear to the neighborhood grapevine, absorbing the folklore and the phantasms, and tracing the old faultlines to see what can be drawn from this. And the answer is usually quite a lot.”

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