Literary New Orleans is made possible by The Historic New Orleans Collection, a free museum, research center and publisher in the heart of the French Quarter.

Visit hnoc.org/ourbooks to learn of the collection's nonfiction titles, including Louisiana Lens: Photographs from The Historic New Orleans Collection by John H. Lawrence.

The Garden District Book Shop at the Rink, with collections of national and regional titles, design, art, architecture, children's books and literary events.

The Garden District Book Shop at the Rink for nearly 50 years.

LSU Press, publisher of literary legends such as John Kennedy Toole, James Lee Burke and many others.

Learn more at LSUPress.org.

The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities partners with communities, institutions and individuals to explore Louisiana's past, reflect on our present and imagine our future.

Literary scholar Randy Fertel explores improvisation across the disciplines, from neuroscience to psychedelics and hip-hop, from social media to A.I.

and Trump's tweets.

Learn more at Fertel.com.

Hotel Monteleone in the French Quarter.

Paying tribute to the writers and their creative sparks.

Hotel Monteleone, a literary landmark celebrating the prolific talent of the written word.

Independent, locally-owned New Orleans bookstore Octavia Books offers author events, book signings and handpicked books for all ages.

Octaviabooks.com.

The Louisiana Book Festival, a celebration of readers, writers and their books.

Papier Plume in the French Quarter.

Everything for the love of handwriting.

Papierplume.com and by the WYES Producers Circle, a group of generous contributors dedicated the support of WYES local productions.

It's sort of like a migratory bird, I guess, going to a more congenial climate.

I just felt I would like it.

You know, New Orleans has been described variously as the sort of, you know, old auntie, the queen of the South, like an errant cousin.

New Orleans is not a place that you can ignore.

I'm Peggy Scott Laborde.

With an over 300-year history, the city has attracted and nurtured writers from the beginning.

We'll focus on some of them, well-known and lesser known, but all part of Literary New Orleans.

[Typewriter sounds] There's no more interesting city from an architectural, musical or literary point of view.

And I'm a fan of Charleston and Savannah, but they've been manicured into becoming theme parks of the past.

This is the first timeI've actually been able to write with the sound of the rain falling on the banana trees and the, you know, the smell of the river breeze coming in the window.

And it's, it's really been wonderful.

I think it helps to be a Mediterranean city and it helps to be a Caribbean city.

It helps to be an American city at the foot of the Mississippi.

And I think it helps to be hot and humid.

It sort of makes everything have an exotic overlay, where flowers and Spanish moss can bloom in strange ways.

But so can creativity.

Once writers get here, they are seduced.

They're seduced by the visual life, I mean, the visual landscape is so attractive.

And if ever there was one person who contributed to the city's mystique creating great stories, it was Tennessee Williams.

Part of Williams's decision to move to New Orleans was to get a job with the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers Project.

He arrived too late to be hired and instead focused on writing plays.

Times were lean, as he recalls in this 1981 interview with WWL-TV anchor Eric Paulsen.

I had no money and had to hock everything, I remember one time, I hocked a borrowed typewriter, hocked my fraternity pin.

The story of the ill-fated Blanche DuBois, who moves to New Orleans to live with her sister Stella, and Stella's husband Stanley, won Williams the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1948.

Tennessee Williams lived in various locations in the French Quarter, including 722 Toulouse Street.

But it was while renting an attic apartment at 632 St. Peter that he wrote what would become his most famous play.

It was called The Poker Night, and he kept that title for one of the scenes.

But I mean that's not a very intriguing title, is it?

And he said from that room, I could hear that rattle trap streetcar running up one way and the one named Cemeteries running down the other.

And it seemed to me the ideal metaphor for the human condition.

So he changed the name of the play to A Streetcar Named Desire.

And Streetcar is my best work, yes.

And it's what I call the most seminal of my work.

Streetcar contains all of my major themes.

Blanche says, her first line in the play is, "They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, to transfer to one called cemeteries and then get off at Elysian Fields.

The metaphor, of course, is between life and death.

Desire is, is life.

Cemeteries is, is death.

Elysian Fields represents eternity.

Frequently returning to New Orleans, he sometimes stayed at the Hotel Monteleone.

In 1962, he bought a Greek Revival townhouse in the French Quarter at 1014 Dumaine Street and lived off and on there in a second floor apartment during the last 20 years of his life.

It was there that he worked on his memoirs.

Even though Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, it was New Orleans that he considered his spiritual home.

Anne Rice is best known for her series of vampire novels.

Having lived in San Francisco for many years, Rice and her family relocated to her place of birth in 1988.

Dr. Kenneth Holditch interviewed Rice during the 1989 Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival.

You grow up in Irish Catholic families the way I did, especially in New Orleans, you hear great storytellers, you hear them all around you: aunts, uncles, grandparents.

They know how to tell a story.

They know how to dramatize the simplest event that they're reporting to you.

And I heard people like that from the time I was born.

Rice had a vivid recollection of the birth of her most famous novel.

I sat down at the typewriter.

I wanted to get a short story done by midnight.

And I began to write.

And I just had this single idea really, what would it be like if you could get a vampire to tell you the real truth about what it was like to be immortal?

And more significantly, what if he would tell you the real truth about what it was like to take life as nourishment?

For the author,that initial spark of creation came quickly.

By midnight, I had finished the story, it was 30 pages long.

I'd take the story out, work on it, work on other things, and put them away.

Anyway, I took it out finally, I think around 1972 or three and I began to work on it to get it ready for a short story contest, and it began to grow into the novel.

And I just went with it.

I just wrote, you know day in and day out for about five weeks.

And I knew then that it was going to be my first published work.

I wrote this in my diary.

Accepted for publication nine months later, Rice continued to work on the manuscript.

And I then greatly enlarged it and changed the ending to a much more tragic ending.

It hadn't really ended in that first draft, but it was just a totally instinctive, spontaneous creation.

I had no idea from one day to the next what was going to happen to those characters.

Having sold more than 150 million books, she is probably more responsible than anyone in shaping how the world perceives this place.

She has made New Orleans a destination for Halloween, and there's still a Vampire Lestat Fan Club ball every year.

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy debuted in 1961 and went on to win the National Book Award.

Born in New Orleans, Percy began a career as a medical doctor but ultimately gravitated towards writing full time.

The Moviegoer has an elegance and a grace worn lightly about a person who feels a little bit of malaise, feels a little bit alienated, and goes on a search for what meaning there might be.

And all great writing, almost, from The Odyssey to Huck Finn, involves the journey and the search.

The great novel about the search is The Moviegoer.

Walker Percy's protagonist, Binx Bolling, suffers from memories of a traumatic experience during the Korean War.

He is interested in kind of revisiting this moment of absolutely unique, absolutely significant charge, if you will.

He is so unable to sort of live in ordinary reality as it's been presented to him or have been offered to him that he needs John Wayne Westerns and World War II movies and thrillers and noir and espionage.

I was in Walker Percy's creative writing class in 1976 and it was an amazing class.

Valerie Martin, who was a former student of mine, was in there and Valerie had already published one novel and I had taught creative writing.

And I told Walker I wanted to be in the class and he said, "Well, you've taught creative writing.

And I said, yes, but I want to hear what you have to say about writing novels.

And Walter Isaacson was in the class, so it was quite a remarkable gathering of, of people.

While Holditch was glad to be in such good company, he was in for a surprise.

And Walker brought to class, one day, a manuscript and he said that this very interesting woman had delivered the manuscript to him, thrust it into his hands and said with a grand gesture, with grand gestures, and in a grand voice, she said, Mr. Percy, this is a masterpiece.

It's the work of my son, John Kennedy Toole.

Mrs. Toole was dressed to the nines.

She always wore a hat when she went out.

She was always wore white gloves and, and her son had committed suicide in '69 and Walker read us a chapter of it, and we were all just flabbergasted.

Holditchs interest in the A Confederacy of Dunces manuscript resulted in an unexpected friendship.

She got in touch with me because I reviewed the chapters of the book, even before the book was published, I reviewed them for the Vieux Carre Courier, and she liked my review and called me and asked me to visit her.

And I hesitated to, but Walker encouraged me, and I discovered she lived three blocks from me.

Great irony.And I went to visit her and we became great friends.

Walker Percy called me one day and said, "I have this person who's brought me a manuscript, Thelma Toole, and she wants to get it published.

Would you write something about it for the paper?

Would you at least talk to her?

And she came in to The Times-Picayune newsroom with two boxes of this manuscript.

And I thought, oh my goodness, what is this going to be like?

I remember flipping through it and then starting to get engaged and reading it and saying, wow, it captured the voice of New Orleans.

And I wrote a little piece of the paper talking about the best unpublished novel in New Orleans.

It has all sorts of New Orleans characters in it, not just the French Quarter characters, but other, other eccentric New Orleanians who would not seem eccentric in New Orleans but would to the rest of the country.

During an interview Holditch conducted with Mrs. Toole, she recalled when her son first told her about a book he was working on.

He said, "Mother, I bought a typewriter and I have an idea about a novel for New Orleans.

Everything, it has been in me for a long time, and I didn't have the clear road ahead.

And everything is surfacing now.

He didnt tell me the title.

That was the end of it.

He never did refer to it again.

The night he came, two years later when he came home from Puerto Rico, he handed me the manuscript and he didnt say anything.

And he left the room.

And I looked at the opening page, under the clock at D.H. Holmes, and I said, what a start.

I read about two pages and he came back.

I said, son, I know it's going to be great.

And the next day I read it and I was entranced.

Mrs. Toole spent years sending the manuscript to New York publishers to no avail.

She approached Walker Percy for assistance.

And he made an appointment for the next day.

I handed him the manuscript.

I said, this is a masterpiece.

I was there 10 minutes.

He was ready for a class.

I was so grateful that he took the manuscript.

A week later, a postcard, most flavorful novel of New Orleans I have ever read or ever will read.

And Im going to do what I can.

He sent it to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, his publishers.

They said, since the writer isn't living, we can't take the risk.

I used to keep in touch with him about every two weeks, phone him, and he was getting very depressed.

And I felt, I was very ill, physically.

And I said, here I am he was working on The Second Coming, that's his last novel.

I said, here I am imposing on him, inflicting my sorrow on him.

Percy sent the manuscript to Les Phillabaum, the head of Louisiana State University Press.

Phillabaum had it six months, I suffered through all, the publisher keeps it six weeks, if he doesn't like it, he returns it.

If he likes it, he is going to publish it, six weeks.

Then I phoned Walker Percy again.

Sugar, sweetheart, darling, I said, Walker, please ask him what he's going to do, I cannot live through this.

He writes a lengthy letter, taking some more time, to Phillabaum and the beginning of his letter, I am stunned by the whole situation.

We intend to publish it.

We do scholarly books, but we are going to take it on.

So it eased.

Yes.

It was a very daring thing for a university press to do.

A Confederacy of Dunces won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

And then later on for his trouble, in 1981, when Confederacy of Dunces was published, it was a rival to his own book, The Second Coming, for the Pulitzer Prize and Confederacy of Dunces won.

Tooles novel concerning the irascible Ignatius J. Reilly has sold more than 2 million copies in more than two dozen languages.

It's a 20th century New Orleans reboot of a Don Quixote story, a kind of lofty dreamer for whom the affairs of this world are a nuisance.

In 1986, a statue of Ignatius J. Reilly by sculptor Bill Ludwig was erected in front of what was the D.H. Holmes department store on Canal Street.

Today, it's a hotel.

Modeled after actor John "Spud McConnell, who portrayed the character on area stages for many years, the bronze figure is a tribute to the brilliance of John Kennedy Toole.

In 2006, on Mardi Gras Day, the Rex Parade celebrated artists and writers who have worked in New Orleans.

Perched atop a float honoring John Kennedy Toole was Ignatius, complete with his signature ear flap hunter's hat, a fitting tribute to a writer who created a truly original New Orleans character.

We are able to get glimpses of early voices from New Orleans through diaries.

Born in France, Marc Antoine Caillot worked as a clerk for the French companies of the Indies and came to New Orleans in 1729.

His journal has been translated into English and published as a book called A Company Man by the Historic New Orleans Collection.

His account of attending a party with friends around Mardi Gras is one of the earliest mentions we have of the celebration.

The whole gathering seemed very satisfied with our visit and no sooner had we entered, then they made us all dance.

Afterward, in order for us to take some refreshments, they asked us in earnest to take off our masks.

Beginning in 1790s, New Orleans sees a great influx of refugees from Saint-Domingue, or Haiti what we call today.

This was because of the Haitian revolution.

These people were of all types and classes, all races.

And we're talking about 20,000 people, I believe.

It's a huge influx of French language speakers.

Many local writers felt strongly about their French heritage.

They wanted people in New Orleans and Louisiana to keep speaking French, to keep reading French, to think of themselves as connected to this French motherland.

What is considered the first anthology of poetry by African-American writers was written and published in New Orleans in 1845.

At the helm was Armand Lanusse, a poet and teacher.

Well, he was a leader, an intellectual leader and a writer and dedicated to that group.

He wanted their brilliance to be shared, and they were trying to prove themselves.

Hey, we're educated, we're intellectual, we are civilized.

So they were always trying to fit in, but they couldn't.

They were still black.Lanusse's writing group called themselves Les Cenelles, which means mayhaw, a type of thornberry.

Much of the poetry contains work reminiscent of the French Romantic movement, mostly about love, but also in a subtle manner hinting at discontent with being ostracized by New Orleans society.

17 writers contributed 85 poems.

Among the contributors was Victor Sejour, both a poet and a playwright.

Both black and white writers were part of a community that considered themselves Creole.

Creole originally meant something from over there, over there meaning the other side of the Atlantic, whether it be Europe, continental Europe, whether it be Africa and that, that other thing.

Usually it's used to designate people, is now placed over here in the New World, in Louisiana, in New Orleans.

I've met Creoles all over the world and we're so much more alike than we are different.

We are a people united by culture, separated by seas.

Charles Gayarre, Adrien Roquette, many others, were really kind of like pushing this Creole identity forward and pushing this Frenchness forward.

Over the years, the influx of English-speaking newcomers to New Orleans began to have an impact.

I think, most importantly, Charles Gayarre, who's the one I kind of identify as the grandfather of Louisiana and New Orleans literature, he has no choice and he has to switch from publishing in French to publishing in English.

A free man of color from New York, Solomon Northup's harrowing account of his kidnapping and being sent to Louisiana as a slave is now well known thanks to an Academy Award-winning film.

Northup's 1853 memoir includes his experiences of being sold at a New Orleans slave market.

12 Years a Slave was considered a best-seller but faded into obscurity.

A young girl in the early 1930s out in Avoyelles Parish was in the library of some plantation house and was, her name was Sue Eakin, and she happened to chance upon this volume.

Picks it up, starts thumbing around and it recognizes the names of the families that lived at the neighboring plantations, realized that this book was a book about her immediate environment and basically as a kid, dedicated her life to that book, to giving it a proper audience and a proper airing and getting it into the world.

Eventually becoming a college history professor, Eakin's persistence spanned over three decades.

She collaborated with Joe Logsdon at UNO and together they brought forth 12 Years a Slave.

I think it was published in '68, '69.

Was immediately, it seems to me, hailed as a fundamental resource in comprehending what the experience of enslavement was.

Fast forward how many years?

40-odd years, becomes a movie.

Writer Kate Chopin, who moved from St. Louis to New Orleans with her family in 1870, felt hampered by the traditional role of women in the Victorian era.

The heroine of her novel The Awakening champions then-unorthodox views on femininity, marriage and motherhood.

The main impact of Chopin is her strong female characters, I mean, and also sort of free and assertive and, I mean, you know, sexually active and want to be unbound by society's dictates.

By the 1970s, though, English departments are embracing feminism and greeting this new masterpiece of the American canon.

In 1877, Greek-born writer Lafcadio Hearn moved from Cincinnati to New Orleans, quickly embracing what he considered a more laid back, almost Caribbean culture.

Initially freelancing for a Cincinnati newspaper, he soon found work with the New Orleans Daily City Item and later, the Times Democrat.

While writing for the Item, he also created and published 200 woodcuts of daily life and people.

Unfortunately, after six months he had to give up doing the woodcuts, which proved to be too much of a strain on his eyesight.

Hearn wrote about New Orleans people and places, rituals, including Carnival and even voodoo.

He wrote for such national publications as Harper's Weekly and Scribner's Magazine.

From his time in the city came books: Gombo Zhebes: Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs and La Cuisine Creole, a collection of recipes from local housewives and chefs.

Hearn also wrote Chita: A Memory of Last Island, a novella based on the Hurricane of 1856.

Some of his newspaper essays were later gathered together in a volume called Creole Sketches.

In 1887, Hearn moved to Martinique as the French West Indies correspondent for Harper's Weekly.

Two years later, he went on to Japan, where he married and became a Japanese citizen.

But his decade-long stay in New Orleans was time well spent for him and us.

Mark Twain, whose actual name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, visited New Orleans first while in training to be a Steamboat pilot in 1859.

He was 23.

He disembarked from his vessel, the S.S. Alex Scott.

It turned out to be March the 8th.

In a letter that he wrote to his sister, Pamela, he described his experience.

I saw a hundred men, women and children in fine, fancy, splendid, ugly, coarse, ridiculous, grotesque, laughable costumes.

And the truth flashed upon me: this is Mardi Gras!

A quarter of a century later, Twain was back in New Orleans.

Now well-established as a popular writer, he was traveling along the river again to gain material for his memoir, Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883.

In his recollections, it wasn't just Mardi Gras that left an impression this time.

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

Twain's ties to the city also included a friendship with a fellow writer, George Washington Cable.

Cable enjoyed a national audience with his own books.

One of his best known is The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life.

It examines the lives and loves of the Grandissime family, which includes members from different races and classes in New Orleans Creole society.

How it really shows you what happened in this city and in the, you know, the social and racial strata that were so complicated.

It's hard to believe that we did keep it together.

George Washington Cable was run out of town, essentially.

It was very difficult for him to stay here.

He was anti-slavery, he didn't believe in inequality among the races.

And he often wrote about that.

Grace King was a prolific regional historian and author who focused on challenges faced by women in the post-Reconstruction South.

Grace King is an important figure in the literature of New Orleans, especially for the salon that she hosted.

She had a regular weekly meeting in her living room that ran for like 30 years or more, and it became a hub for major intellectuals who were visiting the city and major writers who were visiting the city.

And for people here in the city who were interested in ideas and books, to meet.

One of King's best-known works is New Orleans, The Place and the People.

Beautifully written book with a lot of interesting things to say in it.

There's almost no reference to slavery, and that's a strange thing that makes her work, that brackets her work, and it seems to me, fits it into a certain kind of tradition that is, is what it is.

And it's a, it's a product of its time.

By the 1920s, the French Quarter was considered a rundown neighborhood, but still full of charm.

The rent, inexpensive.

New Orleans had gained a reputation as an exotic setting, a place where you could be yourself, a muse for writers.

Originally from Ohio, Sherwood Anderson was enjoying the success of his novel Winesburg, Ohio.

In 1924, he and his wife moved into 540-B St. Peter Street, one of the historic Pontalba Apartments.

He beckoned budding writers to the city.

Anderson and his wife welcomed such literary luminaries as William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg, Thomas Wolfe and Lyle Saxon.

Faulkner and the Andersons were especially close.

The young writeractually stayed with the couple when he arrived in the city.

He was working on his first novel, Soldiers' Pay.

While in New Orleans, Faulkner wrote prose sketches that appeared in The Times-Picayune and The Double Dealer, a short-lived but influential local literary magazine that included the works of Ernest Hemingway and Robert Penn Warren.

In March of 1925, Faulkner moved into an apartment at 624 Pirates Alley with Anderson's friend artist William Spratling.

The next year, he and Spratling published a short book of quips and illustrations of some of their creative friends.

Satirical and with a bit of a bite, it was called Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles.

Sherwood Anderson and Other Creoles is this kind of still amazing compendium portrait of anyone who was in this, and some who were definitely operated around the fringes, Bohemian, intellectual, also, there's also some, like old Tulane professors in there.

Anyone who we would think of today as artsy.

A few years later, Faulkner wrote a novel called Mosquitoes, drawing from his New Orleans experiences.

The plot takes place on Lake Pontchartrain during a yacht cruise that he took with Anderson and friends.

Remarkably, Faulkner spent just six months in New Orleans.

Yet another work, Pylon, was also inspired by his time in the city.

Before William Faulkner moved to New Orleans, he was primarily a poet.

When he left, he was on his way to becoming a Nobel Prize-winning novelist and the author of more than 30 books.

During the mid-1930s, the federal government initiated a Works Progress Administration project with the intent of providing employment for writers.

New Orleans was one of several cities chosen to spotlight through a travel guide.

At the helm, popular regional writer Lyle Saxon.

Saxon chronicled the city with his six books, including Fabulous New Orleans.

But much of his time was spent in charge of both the city guide and one for Louisiana itself.

The stuff that Saxon oversaw is by far the best and the most important.

Saxon spawned some imitators Herbert Asbury, Robert Tallant, Harnett Kane, all very capable and artful prose stylists whose subject, for some of their major work was this place.

For the city guide, Saxon hired Marcus Christian to lead a team that would focus on Black New Orleans culture.

Their headquarters was Dillard University.

So not only was he a poet and a printer, but he was an activist of sorts.

And he literally raised ageneration of folklore that we would never have.

Into the 40s, New Orleans as a literary colony continue to attract talent.

Truman Capote is around the corner on Royal Street writing Other Voices, Other Rooms.

Tennessee Williams is writing Streetcar.

In this context, Frances Parkinson Keyes' Dinner at Antoine's becomes the thing the reading public of the United States really gets a hold of.

In 1944, Frances Parkinson Keyes moved from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, initially renting and later purchasing 1113 Chartres Street.

And from there continued her prolific writing career, which would total over 50 books.

Her best known work is Dinner at Antoine's, a murder mystery.

I remember the first time I read it, I thought, I think I read it in one sitting because I just thought, okay, let's go.

Only a few blocks away, a young man named Truman Capote was busy working on what would be his first novel.

Capote claimed that he was born at the Hotel Monteleone, where his parents were staying.

But his mother did make it to Touro Infirmary in time.

The year?

1924.

His parents divorced when he was two years old.

With only brief stays to New Orleans as a child to visit his father, as an adult, he returned to the city in 1945.

He lived in a rundown apartment at 711 Royal Street to work on the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms.

It's about a young boy born in New Orleans who his family quickly decides to remove to a remote part of Mississippi, where he will live with his father and another man.

And it's kind of a gothic, decaying southern mansion situation where we begin to understand, it seems, that the father is probably gay.

As such, in the 1940s, that's very new territory.

Well, it's instantly on the bestseller list and stays on the bestseller list for quite a little while.

Truman Capote had a fondness for New Orleans at the beginning of his career, and even in later work.

He puts out a collection of essays called Music for Chameleons.

It's dedicated to Tennessee Williams and the last essay in the book is him sitting in Jackson Square.

And it's a tour de force of social observation, character study and wit.

And a kind of, certain kind of sensibility is quintessential Truman Capote at the height of his powers.

In January of 1949, Jack Kerouac, his friend Neal Cassady and some other pals visited New Orleans during one of the epic trips chronicled in Kerouac's classic, On the Road.

And so Kerouac came on his journeys and would celebrate and revel and party, if you like, in New Orleans, and then stay over at Bill Burroughs' house.

So he had a home base to explore here.

From 1948 to '49, poet William S. Burroughs and his family lived in a house in Algiers, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.

Burroughs wrote and served as host to stars of the Beat Generation.

While as a professor at Tulane, Doug Brinkley had a literary marker erected in front of the Burroughs home.

He really was a waystation for people of that Beat world and the house is there, and the owners didn't mind putting it up.

In Algiers at 509 Wagner Street, Burroughs completed his first novel called Junkie based on his heroin addiction.

Kerouac and his buddies arrived in New Orleans with great anticipation.

And so coming down here and catching the music off the streets, being at the citadel of jazz was a, it's like going to a sacred place.

It was like the Mecca of American sound.

And the music that he loved.

And New Orleans becomes a central part of that On the Road mythology, to the point that when Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda made their famous Easy Rider film, I mean, they end up that the destination was the French Quarter, meaning the ultimate place on an American road trip is you've got to hit New Orleans.

A literary magazine and books of poetry now considered shining examples of the Beat Generation came forth from the efforts of a most unlikely couple.

Jon Edgar Webb and his wife, Louise, known as Gypsy Lou, arrived from St. Louis by Greyhound bus in 1940.

Both coming out of difficult marriages, Webb had worked as a crime reporter, but later robbed a jewelry store.

While in prison, he learned the printing trade and wrote fiction.

Their goal in New Orleans: to create publications showcasing writers outside the mainstream.

They named their publishing business after themselves: Loujon Press.

The Webbs called their magazine The Outsider.

Gypsy Lou was on almost every cover.

The Outsider is publishing Jean Genet and Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Henry Miller.

The Beat Generation is choosing that magazine to unveil their brand new stuff at a moment when On the Road had only been out just a couple of years.

It's red hot stuff and they are in direct dialogue with the stars of that movement.

They had their bed and their printing press all in one room.

I was kind of shocked.

Each page had to be individually inserted and printed and, and it was an arduous process.

Oil executive Edwin Blair met the Webbs in 1963.

Jon Webbasked him for financial support to publish a book of poetry.

That poet's name was Charles Bukowski, then a San Francisco-based postal worker.

He was definitely a working man's poet and he was somebody who was very down to earth.

It Catches My Heart in its Hands drew national acclaim.

I opened The New York Times and there, miraculously, the first Bukowski-Webb book was reviewed.

That was unbelievable, you know,you never expected that from this little press and this little group that was working away in the French Quarter.

For Bukowski, the book helped kick off his career.

People love Bukowski so much and they're so dedicated to a kind of edgy relationship to the world because of him,that they make a point of shoplifting his books more than any other book that they sell.

Blair's friendship with the Webbs continued to grow.

He was a wonderful, wonderful man.

And of course, Gypsy Lou was flamboyant and great to be with.

They were a terrific couple.

She received the nickname Gypsy Lou from a local writer in reference to her clothing style.

To make ends meet she sold paintings on a Royal Street corner.

New Orleans artist Noel Rockmore created the cover for the Webbs' second Bukowski poetry book, Crucifix in a Deathhand.

While not as financially successful as the first book, it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Today, copies of The Outsider and the books of poetry the Webbs published are highly collectible.

New Orleans-born poet, writer and playwright Tom Dent grew up in an accomplished family.

His father, Dr. Albert Dent, was the longtime president of Dillard University.

The writer left home to attend college and served in the Army.

By the late 1950s, Dent settled in New York to work for the NAACP.

He co-founded the highly respected Umbra Writers Workshop.

Among the notable authors he met in Manhattan was James Baldwin.

Dent returned to New Orleans in 1965 to join the Free Southern Theater and help develop its writers workshop, where he felt he could make an impact.

Oh my God, the Free Southern Theater, documenting that, documenting the Civil Rights journey.

Several of my other younger students I would introduce to him, and one became kind of his literary son.

So he was always involved in raising that whole idea of the community workshop.

Community workshops were the mainstay because Black literature wasn't taught.

New Orleans writer and editor Kalamu ya Salaam worked with Dent.

Tom was urbane, mentor and friend.

Tom had a way of being comfortable with all levels of society.

Tom connected me to aspects of my heritage that I would not have connected to otherwise on a personal level.

Dent's writings include portraits of life in New Orleans with attention to everyday cultural and social experiences.

He published two books of poetry and three plays, including Ritual Murder in 1976.

And it was the ritual of oppression and exploitation that we suffered and then turned around and inflicted upon ourselves.

For me, Tom Dent's Ritual Murder is the best and most intense look at the city's role in young Black men turning to crime.

I've seen it performed four times probably and every time, I'm taken with it and moved and when I first read it, I was moved to tears.

Dent's nonfiction book, Southern Journey: A Return to the Civil Rights Movement, follows his travels in the early 1990s to important sites of Civil Rights actions in the 1960s.

He served as executive director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation.

Dent died at the age of 66.

The foundation now runs the Tom Dent Congo Square Lecture series in his honor.

Kalamu ya Salaam has a tangible reminder of his dear friend.

Whenever I would travel north, particularly during the winter, Tom would hold my hand.

How would he hold my hand?

Long after he's deceased, I inherited Tom's gloves and so whenever I would go north, I would be wearing his gloves during the cold weather.

I would have them on my hands and so forth and so on.

And so in that sense, he was holding my hand.

Ya Salaam compiled Dent's poetry, essays and the play Ritual Murder into New Orleans Griot: The Tom Dent Reader.

Well, the griot, traditionally in West African, was the culture bearer of the community and was responsible for keeping ancestry intact and passing it on.

New Orleans has long been home to Pulitzer Prize winners, including Shirley Ann Grau.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for Keepers of the House.

But my favorite novel of hers is the House on Coliseum Street.

1961, she examines just so many topics that we're still grappling with today.

Sheila Bosworth embraced the city as a setting with her powerful books.

Sheila Bosworth's Almost Innocent is, it's a beautiful story, but it's also a page turner.

I think I read it in a day.

And, you know, it takes place in New Orleans and across the lake and in a storm.

And she and Nancy Lemann, in the 80s, they were the books we were all reading.

And Nancy Lemann's Lives of the Saints is another, it's a little bit more lighthearted and funny.

Bosworth followed up with Slow Poison in the early 1990s.

New Orleans in the 1990s, there was a literary renaissance here.

You had Ambrose doing history here, I came down, Walter Isaacson was getting at top form.

At the same time, Michael Lewis was becoming the huge writer, Nick Lemann was taking off.

Then you had Anne Rice here doing the goth stuff.

You had writers like Richard Ford, you know, who won a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist.

Andrei Codrescu was doing NPR commentary that was really kinetic nationally.

Since 1987, the Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival has showcased local and national writers on a variety of topics.

The almost five day event includes panels, readings, theater, poetry, writing contests and music events, even a Stanley and Stella shouting contest echoing a pivotal moment from Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.

Stella!

Since 2003, under the umbrella of the Williams Festival is the Saints and Sinners Festival, focusing on LGBTQ literature.

Early on we had Greg Herren writing about LGBTQ characters, and I think he's written more than 30 books and a couple of different series.

And then JeanRedmann has written nine books in her Micky Knight series.

So there's the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University every spring, which is alsoappealing to the city at large, as well as Tulane students.

There's Words and Music, which takes place every Fall and is an outgrowth of One Book, One New Orleans, and that is devoted to the cause of social justice.

Each October, the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge is a daylong celebration that takes place on the grounds of the State Capitol and within the building itself.

New Orleans is blessed to have numerous bookstores.

Among the oldest is Garden District Book Shop.

Signings are held on a regular basis.

Also Uptown is Octavia Books.

It too, is a gathering place showcasing authors.

Since 1983, the Community Book Center has been a cultural and social hub for the city, featuring African-American-centered literature.

Mama Jane and Miss Vera, they will find the exact right book for me.

It's a very caring environment.

Named after writer James Baldwin, Baldwin and Company Bookstore and Café in the Marigny neighborhood is home to signings and community events.

The French Quarter has long been the setting for bookstores, including Faulkner House Books, where William Faulkner lived in the 20s.

And Barnes and Noble Booksellers, the national chain, has a local presence staging author events.

The New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts and local universities all contribute to the literary life, including the long-running creative writing workshop at the University of New Orleans.

One of the great things about the UNO creative writing program is that you see the graduates all over town with their books.

It's so exciting.

I think of the very beginning, back in the early days with Rick Barton, you know With Extreme Prejudice, Courting Pandemonium, his books, and writers keep coming along like Louis Edwards, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, so many others.

The great poet Jericho Brown.

You know, I think I was struggling to become a writer before that.

And when I went into the program at University of New Orleans, it changed my life.

New Orleans is ripe with writers who focus on nonfiction.

I was once invited to a writer's conference in Iowa, and I told my daughter I was going, and she said, well, why are you invited to a writers' conference?

I said, Well, I've written quite a few books.

And she said, but dad, you're a nonfiction writer, you're not a real writer.

And of course, Walter Isaacson, who has written beaucoup, you know, biographies.

Carol Gelderman, who did that wonderful biography of Mary McCarthy and Henry Ford and Louis Auchincloss.

I mean, I would, I wish we had more books from Carol because she's such a wickedly entertaining writer.

And then Nigel Hamilton, who has written so amazingly about Churchill and Roosevelt, and Pat Brady, who's written about First Ladies Martha Washington and Rachel Jackson.

The late University of New Orleans history professor Dr. Stephen Ambrose was the author of books on Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.

Ambrose hired Douglas Brinkley in 1993 to head the Eisenhower Research Center, and they became good friends.

I learned so much from him.

He had different rules.

That, one was abandon chronology at your own peril.

I hear his voice whenever I'm writing a book because it's showing you a writer who's able to take a topic as large as World War II, write bestselling bookslike D-Day or Band of Brothers, Pegasus Bridge, and then lead the movement to honor the veterans of World War II and then work to fundraise.

And he subsidized the museum with a big chunk of his own money, which is a great gift back to the city.

Jason Berry's topics include the New Orleans music scene and his pioneering investigative reporting of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

Two authors have dedicated their lives to the local cityscape.

We have what I call indispensable scholars.

And first and foremost among them is Richard Campanella, the great geographer who has taught us so much.

And another one I would put in that category is Larry Powell at Tulane.

Both of these guys are at Tulane, who has really educated us about the early days of our history and also John Barry.

John Barry is one of the great stories of New Orleans writers.

There was The Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America.

It came out in 1997.

It was a really important book, a bestseller, illuminated so much about our city.

Journalist-clarinetist Tom Sancton mixed music with memoir with his reminiscence of the New Orleans jazz musicians he learned from in the early 1960s.

His father, Thomas Sancton, was a longtime journalist praised for his Civil Rights reporting and the author of two novels.

English professor/novelist Fatima Shaik spent years translating and compiling the records of a century-old Black Catholic mutual aid society that her father retrieved from a trash bin.

Her book is titled Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood.

There's yetanother facet to local literary life: the poetry scene.

On Sunday afternoons, the sound of words, not music, emanate from the Maple Leaf Bar.

One of the longest-running poetry series in America was created in honor of Everette Maddox, a fixture at the bar.

An annual poetry festival is yet another opportunity for both emerging and more seasoned writers.

Every month on the first Saturday of every month, the Latter Library hosts a poetry buffet, and they've just published a wonderful book.

It's easy to round up 100 poets in New Orleans, that's how vibrant the poetry scene is.

New Orleans is also home to book publishing.

We have so many publishers.

We have Pelican Publishing, which has been around forever and has done a lot of local classics and has kept so many important books in print for such a long time and has worked really hard to support local children's authors in getting culturally appropriate books out to people.

The Historic New Orleans Collection publishes books with a local history connection.

Arthur Hardy Enterprises has published many books on the history of the New Orleans Carnival, including Rex: 150 Years of the School of Design by Stephen W. Hales.

And then we have University of New Orleans Press, countless small presses around town, and now, as more and more authors turn to self-publishing, we're seeing, you know, lots of people pick up the publishing bug.

But Pelican is the oldest.

Since 1957, volunteers have organized the Symphony Book Fair to support what is now the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra.

Book lovers have thousands of books and artwork, along with music media, to choose from.

A local eateryhas taken the term food for thought and added a twist.

Melba's, in the Marigny neighborhood, is a restaurant and laundromat that gives away books with a purchase of a meal.

Owned by Scott and Jane Wolfe, Jane spearheads this effort.

It just gives these books away and the authors is there.

I had the opportunity to do it.

It was beautiful.

And you're reaching an audience that might not be walking into the independent bookstores in the city, but they are readers and they do love books.

Many books were written about 2005's Hurricane Katrina, including Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming of the Superstorms by John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein.

Douglas Brinkley's The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Tom Piazza's Why New Orleans Matters and Chris Rose's One Dead in the Attic.

A look at life in New Orleans shortly after the storm can be viewed through the eyes of Ian McNulty in Season of Night: New Orleans Life after Katrina.

And also poignant, Dan Baum's Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death and Life in New Orleans, which chronicles the compelling Katrina experiences of nine locals.

Katrina memories continue to resonate.

Sarah Broom is the author of The Yellow House.

Somebody who is from New Orleans East, there are so many things in her book The Yellow House that won the National Book Award that I never even considered.

The way that she describes the history, the lives of the people, her family that lived in that in that neighborhood.

It was very eye opening.

You think of Elizabeth Tran's Daughters of the New Year.

We're starting to get a different look at Katrina through younger eyes.

And it's a very important one for the future.

And the other thing that we saw after Katrina was the importance of libraries, because so many of our branch libraries were mobilized for different purposes, for FEMA, for disaster relief.

And we learned that libraries belong to the people and we began to value them differently.

I'm hopeful about the future of Louisiana writers, Louisiana voices and especially New Orleans voices.

Meeting the younger generation, the Sunni Patterson's, the Karisma Prices, these voices.

I love that we have another generation of writers who are picking up the mantle and are embracing the uniqueness that we are and giving us so much hope.

What is it that makes a literary community?

And it's many things.

In New Orleans, its first and foremost the fact that we have a bricks and mortar literary history.

We can go look at visit, touch.

During my exile in California, 25 years or so, I would have, you know, dreams about New Orleans.

I was obsessed with it.

And I think a great deal of the longing and a great deal of the missing of New Orleans went into making the chapters of my books about New Orleans particularly vivid for me.

Literary New Orleans is made possible by The Historic New Orleans Collection, a free museum, research center and publisher in the heart of the French Quarter.

Visit hnoc.org/ourbooks to learn of the collection's nonfiction titles, including Louisiana Lens: Photographs from The Historic New Orleans Collection by John H. Lawrence.

The Garden District Book Shop at the Rink, with collections of national and regional titles, design, art, architecture, children's books and literary events.

The Garden District Book Shop at the Rink for nearly 50 years.

LSU Press, publisher of literary legends such as John Kennedy Toole, James Lee Burke and many others.

Learn more at LSUPress.org.

The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities partners with communities, institutions and individuals to explore Louisiana's past, reflect on our present and imagine our future.

Literary scholar Randy Fertel explores improvisation across the disciplines, from neuroscience to psychedelics and hip-hop, from social media to A.I.

and Trump's tweets.

Learn more at Fertel.com.

Hotel Monteleone in the French Quarter.

Paying tribute to the writers and their creative sparks.

Hotel Monteleone, a literary landmark celebrating the prolific talent of the written word.

Independent, locally-owned New Orleans bookstore Octavia Books offers author events, book signings and handpicked books for all ages.

Octaviabooks.com.

The Louisiana Book Festival, a celebration of readers, writers and their books.

Papier Plume in the French Quarter.

Everything for the love of handwriting.

Papierplume.com and by the WYES Producers Circle, a group of generous contributors dedicated the support of WYES' local productions.