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.

Richard S. Kennedy (1920--2002) was the author of Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings and The Window of Memory: A Literary Biography of Thomas Wolfe. He also edited the collection Literary New Orleans: Essays and Meditations. He was a professor emeritus of English at Temple University in Philadelphia.