Literary New Orleans in the Modern World

Cleanth Brooks may have summarized it best: ""New Orleans has become one of the cities of the mind, and is therefore immortal."" Its writers make it so. Like Richard S. Kennedy's earlier collection Literary New Orleans, these nine essays explore the belletristic Crescent City - its history, authors, myths, and realities. This volume focuses on twentieth-century New Orleans, beginning with modernism's brief blooming in the 1920s, followed by the fading of New Orleans's peculiarly dreamy romanticism and the flourishing of a distinctive realism, and concluding with a recurrence and transformation of the earlier romantic strain in contemporary Gothic and mystery fiction. Literary New Orleans in the Modern World provides chapters in the history of a unique American city, written in the very spirit of New Orleans as it has cast its spell on writers.