WRITERS IN NEW ORLEANS: FINDING THEIR PLACE, DEFINING THE CITY—WALKING TOUR

For some authors, New Orleans has been a place that freed them to become the writers we know. Tennessee Williams said, “In New Orleans…I found the kind of freedom I had always needed, and the shock of it—against the Puritanism of my nature—has given me a subject, a theme, which I have never ceased exploiting.” Jimmy Buffet put it more simply: “You find as a writer that there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.” For others, the city itself became the subject—Lafcadio Hearn, for example, who Frederick Starr proposes “invented” the image of New Orleans that has long lured nascent writers and continues to influence the way visitors see the city. Award-winning geographer Richard Campanella has written 11  books and a multitude of articles examining the city under his microscope, always interested in how the city’s reality diverges from the popular conceptions held by citizens and visitors. There are simply too many writers associated with New Orleans to reference them all in a two-hour tour, but we will cover quite a number as we stroll through the French Quarter, starting at the Hotel Monteleone, walking downriver for a number of blocks and then circling back to end up in Jackson Square. We’ll be looking at places where writers lived or visited, where they wrote, and the locations mentioned in their work. Your guide, Dana Criswell, will include writers who are from here (e.g., John Kennedy Toole, Anne Rice, George Washington Cable, Maurice Carlos Ruffin), moved here (e.g., Tom Piazza, Richard Ford), lived here for a long or short while (e.g., William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, O. Henry, Katherine Anne Porter, Tennessee Williams) or lived elsewhere but visited frequently and used the city, to some extent, as a setting (e.g., Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, John Steinbeck).

Thursday, March 27; Friday, March 28; Saturday, March 29; and Sunday, March 30; Times are all 10:30 AM – 12 Noon.