RVLouisiana's Literary Heritage

Louisiana's Literary Heritage

Louisiana's rich cultural gumbo and its many peoples and customs continue to inspire literary efforts from its citizens and visitors. Here is an overview of Louisiana's literary history.

The Recent South Reflected in Louisiana Literature (1950-present)

The writings of the recent South reflect modern concerns as well as traditional themes. Once seen as the economic backwater of America, the region experienced prosperity and urban expansion in the period following World War II. The civil rights movement, especially after Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, ended legal segregation and extended voting rights to African Americans, thus radically altering the social and political landscape.

Some of the significant authors of this period are:

Arna Bontemps (1902-1973) was a poet, author and critic who was born in Alexandria and was schooled in California and at the University of Chicago. He was a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York in the 1920s. He returned to the South to take the post of librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Bontemps received the Alexander Pushkin poetry prize in 1926 and 1927. His fiction reflects concern with black heritage, roots and identity. Memories of his early childhood in Louisiana formed the background for many of Bontemps' short stories. God Sends Sunday (1931) and the children's Lonesome Bay (1955) are set in Louisiana. Other publications include Black Thunder (1936), Drum at Dusk (1939), We Have Tomorrow (1945), Story of the Negro (1948), Story of George Washington Carver (1953), 100 Years of Negro Freedom (1961), and Anyplace But Here (1966). Bontemps edited The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949 (1949), American Negro Poetry (1963), and The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972). Said Virginia Lacy Jones in a memorial essay: Bontemps' "critical insights have been and will continue to be invaluable in the development of understanding and appreciation of black literature and history."
Walker Percy (1915-1990) was born in Alabama, orphaned in his teens and adopted by his father's cousin, William Alexander Percy of Greenville, Mississippi. After receiving a medical degree in 1941, Percy contracted tuberculosis which ended his career in medicine. During his long convalescence he read intensely. After marrying and converting to Catholicism, he moved to New Orleans in 1947 and began writing. In 1950 he moved to Covington where he lived until his death. His first novel, The Moviegoer, (1961) won the National Book Award the following year. The book's principal character is a movie-obsessed Gentilly, Louisiana resident named Binx Bolling. Five other novels followed: The Last Gentleman (1966); Love in the Ruins (1971), winner of the National Catholic Book Award; Lancelot (1977); The Second Coming (1980), winner of the Los Angeles Times fiction prize; and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). He also wrote two books of essays, The Message in the Bottle (1975) and Lost in the Cosmos (1983). Although his books often had Southern settings, including New Orleans and Covington, his themes were universal commentaries on the condition of modern human existence.
Ernest Gaines was born in 1933 on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish. He left Louisiana in 1948 to live with his parents in California. After serving in the armed forces, he attended San Francisco State College and graduate school at Stanford University. His first published major work was Catherine Carmier (1964). Other publications include Of Love and Dust (1967); Bloodline 1968); A Long Day in November (1970); The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), winner of the Louisiana Literary Award; In My Father's House (1978); and A Gathering of Old Men (1983), for which he received the Outstanding Southeastern Author Award. A Lesson Before Dying (1993) was awarded the Louisiana Literary Award, the Southern Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Set in a fictional parish modeled after his birthplace, his writing reflects the place, traditions, people and situations of the area. Gaines' novels are taught in history and literature classes nationwide.
Shirley Ann Grau was born in 1929 in New Orleans. She has published several collections of short stories: The Black Prince and Other Stories (1955), The Wind Shifting West (1973) and Nine Women (1985). Her novels include The Hard Blue Sky (1958), The House on Coliseum Street (1961), Pulitzer prize winner The Keepers of the House (1964), The Condor Passes (1971), Evidence of Love (1977) and Roadwalkers (1994).
John William Corrington (1932-1988) has been compared to William Faulkner. Much of Corrington's serious writings, which include novels, short stories and poems, is set in Shreveport and New Orleans. Corrington worked briefly as a newspaper correspondent, taught English at Louisiana State University and Loyola, and practiced law. His books include the novels And Wait for the Night (1964), The Upper Hand (1967), The Bombardier (1970) and Shad Sentell (1984). His short story collections include The Actes and Monuments (1978), All My Trials (1987), and The Southern Reporter (1981). He also published Lines to the South and Other Poems (1965). With his wife, Joyce Corrington, he wrote a series of crime novels set in New Orleans: So Small a Carnival (1986), A Project Named Desire (1987), A Civil Death (1987) and The White Zone (1990). The Collected Stories of John William Corrington (1990), published posthumously, won the Louisiana Literary Award. He and his wife Joyce wrote the script for several movies and were head writers for television soap operas. He also wrote and produced the television series Superior Court.
Anne Rice, a best-selling author, was born in New Orleans in 1941. She graduated from San Francisco State College and received a master's degree from the University of California at Berkeley. She returned to New Orleans in 1988 and lives near her childhood home. Her published works include Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Feast of All Saints (1979), Cry To Heaven (1982), The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Queen of the Damned (1988), The Mummy (1989), The Witching Hour (1990), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Lasher (1993), and Taltos (1994). Rice has also written under the pseudonyms Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure.
James Lee Burke was born in 1936, grew up on the Texas and Louisiana coasts and attended the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Following graduate school, Burke returned to USL to teach. His first novel was Half of Paradise (1965), and The Last Get-Back Boogie (1986) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His highly successful Dave Robicheaux crime series includes The Neon Rain (1987), Heaven's Prisoners (1988), Black Cherry Blues (1989), A Morning for Flamingos (1990), A Stained White Radiance (1992), In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (1993) and Dixie City Jam (1994). Black Cherry Blues won the Edgar Allan Poe Award.
John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969) was born and educated in New Orleans before doing graduate work at Columbia and Tulane universities. He taught English at several colleges. In 1961 he was drafted into the Army. While there he began work on A Confederacy of Dunces, a comic novel set in New Orleans, but was unable to publish the book. When Toole committed suicide in 1969 at age 32, his mother, Thelma Toole, persisted in the search for a publisher. With the help of Walker Percy, the book was published in 1980 and went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize and the Louisiana Literary Award. Toole's only other novel, The Neon Bible (1989), was written when he was 16.
Yusef Komunyakaa was born in 1947 and grew up in Bogalusa, Louisiana. After service in Vietnam he attended the University of Colorado and did graduate work at Colorado State and the University of California at Irvine. From 1984 to 1985 he lived in New Orleans, where he was poet-in-the-schools. He is currently an associate professor of English at Indiana University. His books include Copacetic (1984), I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), Dien Cai Dau (1988) and Magic City (1992). Neon Vernacular (1993) won the Pulizer Prize for poetry.
Pinkie Gordon Lane was born in Philadephia in 1923 and moved to Baton Rouge in 1956. She was the first black woman to receive a doctorate from Louisiana State University. She began teaching at Southern University in Baton Rouge in 1959, and began writing poetry the same year. Lane was appointed Louisiana State Poet Laureate by Governor Buddy Roemer in 1989. Published volumes of her poetry include Wind Thoughts (1972), The Mystic Female (1978), I Never Scream (1985), and Girl at the Window (1991).

The Southern Renaissance (1920-1950) and the post-Renaissance

Beginning about 1920, and for more than 30 years thereafter, the South dominated literary activity in America. Said Allen Tate in The History of Southern Literature: "With the war of 1914-1918, the South reentered the world - but gave a backward glance as it slipped over the border: That backward glance gave to the Southern [Renaissance] a literature conscious of the past in the present." The literature of this period has "a feeling for the concrete and the specific, an awareness of conflict, a sense of community and of religious wholeness, a belief in perfection ever developing as a result of human effort and planning; a deep-seated sense of the tragic, and a conviction that nature is mysterious and contingent. Any attempt to harness nature and make it a servant of man will always be doomed to failure."

Some of the significant authors of this period are:

Lyle Saxon (1891-1946). He was educated in Baton Rouge schools including Louisiana State University. He wrote for Baton Rouge and Chicago newspapers and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Century Magazine commissioned Saxon to cover the Mississippi River flood of 1927. His first book, Father Mississippi (1927), resulted from that work. Other publications include Fabulous New Orleans (1928), Old Louisiana (1929), and Lafitte the Pirate (1930). His only full length novel, Children of Strangers (1937), was inspired by the story of Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches Parish. The Friends of Joe Gilmore (1948) was published two years after his death. From 1935 to 1942 Saxon was the director of the Louisiana Federal Writers' Project, part of the Works Progress Administration. He edited the Project's New Orleans City Guide (1938), Louisiana, a Guide to the State (1941) and compiled Gumbo Ya-Ya (1945). Saxon was the heir to the Charles Gayarré-Grace King New Orleans literary tradition. His writings deal with the problems of race and caste, themes treated by the earlier writers. Saxon's works realistically describe Louisiana characters and customs. He was known as "Mr. New Orleans" for his life-long championship of the Vieux Carré.
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) joined the Louisiana State University faculty in 1934. In 1935, he was one of the founders of The Southern Review. While at LSU, Warren gathered material for the 1946 Pulitzer prize-winning novel All The King's Men. When The Southern Review ceased publication in 1942, he moved to the University of Minnesota, and then to Yale, where he taught until his retirement in 1973. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Warren received two Pulitzer Prizes for poetry.
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) arrived in New Orleans in late 1938, unsuccessfully seeking a job with the Federal Writers' Project. He lived there on and off until his death. Williams praised New Orleans as the citadel of freedom and inspiration. The city became an integral part of his work, supplying him with subjects, settings and symbols. The play Vieux Carré was set on Toulouse Street where Williams lived in a boarding house. He wrote A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) while living on St. Peter Street. His play Garden District (1958), which became the movie Suddenly Last Summer, took its setting from a friend's house in that part of the city.
Frances Parkinson Keyes (1885-1970) was the author of over 50 popular books. Keyes always did her writing at the actual scene of her stories. She came to Louisiana in 1942 to write Crescent Carnival and returned to write other books. Her novels Blue Camellia (1957), Crescent Carnival (1942), The River Road (1945), Dinner at Antoine's (1948), The Royal Box (1954), Steamboat Gothic (1952), Once on Esplanade (1947), and Madame Castel's Lodger (1962) reflect Louisiana life. She also wrote All This is Louisiana (1950), a book done in collaboration with Elemore Morgan, the photographer. In 1945 she moved to the Beauregard House in the Vieux Carré and continued to live there a part of each year for the rest of her life. She was involved in expanding the renovation work on the home begun by Beauregard House, Inc.

The Southern Review

According to C. Vann Woodward, "[t]he center of the avant-garde of American literary criticism shifted temporarily to the banks of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge" when The Southern Review, the distinguised literary journal, was established at Louisiana State University. The first issue of the quarterly appeared on June 15, 1935. Under the co-editorship of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, The Southern Review for seven years marked LSU as the literary center of the South and won acclaim throughout the English-speaking world. The journal published stories, essays and poems by national famous writers including Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor and others. Publication ceased with the Spring 1942 issue when the university withdrew financial support. The Southern Review resumed publication in January 1965 and continues to be published by LSU.

During his years at LSU with The Southern Review, Warren wrote two novels, some of his finest poems and stories, and absorbed material for the Pulitzer Prize-winning All the King's Men. Brooks wrote Modern Poetry and Tradition and The Well Wrought Urn. Warren and Brooks collaborated on three textbooks that revolutionized the teaching of college English.

Melrose Plantation and Cammie Henry

Mrs. Cammie Henry, owner of Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches Parish, made her library and home available to scholars, writers and artists, providing a sympathetic milieu where creative people could meet and work. Many from the French Quarter gathered there, including Sherwood Anderson, Roark Bradford, Harnett Kane, Lyle Saxon, Robert Tallant, Ada Jack Carver, Caroline Dormon and Gwen Bristow. In 1927, Lyle Saxon gave up his apartment in New Orleans and moved to Melrose. He spent his most productive years there. In Children of Strangers, his only full-length novel, he used Melrose and the local people as the setting and characters for his story. Another Louisiana writer, Harnett Kane, wrote Plantation Parade at Melrose.

The French Quarter - "Greenwich Village South"

During the 1920s and 1930s the French Quarter attracted many authors and artists, who enjoyed the intellectual life of New Orleans. Many of these young writers, who used Louisiana's colorful past and present as inspiration, would later gain national recognition: James K. Feibleman, Roark Bradford, Lyle Saxon, Hamilton Basso, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and others.

Sherwood Anderson arrived in New Orleans in 1922 and was responsible for attracting William Faulkner to the city in 1925 and 1926. By the time Faulkner returned to Oxford, Mississippi, he had published one novel, finished a second and envisioned Yoknapatawpha County, the setting for his greatest fiction.

In 1920 a group of New Orleans intellectuals and writers founded the literary magazine The Double Dealer, which became a nationally known literary journal. The first issue appeared in January 1921. During its five-year history, it discovered and published the works of notable American authors such as Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, Edmund Wilson and Robert Penn Warren, as well as Anderson, Hemingway and Faulkner. William Faulkner's first published prose writings were in the January-February 1925 issue. The magazine was cosmopolitan and liberal with modern tendencies, making a break with the old romantic literary traditions.

Postbellum Period (1870-1920)

Louisiana literature began attaining a national prominence in the postbellum period. There were no literary centers or publishers in the South, so Louisiana writers had to rely on northern publishers and a northern reading public. "Local color" fiction was popular with northern readers. The genre used local settings and characters and the romantic myths of the plantation South. Louisiana's exotic appeal, rich history and racial mix were fertile sources for writers. The northern literary journals Scribner's, Century, Harper's Monthly Magazine, and Atlantic Monthly sought out and encouraged native Louisiana writers such as Grace King and George Washington Cable. Kate Chopin and Lafcadio Hearn, visitors to Louisiana, used their Louisiana experiences in their writings.

Interest in the Louisiana landscape, language and its people, poor whites, blacks, Creoles and planters, characterized the works of this period. The writings were tied to the past as well as looked forward to the work of Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Robert Penn Warren and others.

Some of the significant authors of this period are:

Kate Chopin (1850-1904) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1870 she married Oscar Chopin, a French Creole from Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. They lived in New Orleans and often summered in Grand Isle. In 1879 Chopin's cotton brokerage failed, and the couple moved to the Chopin's family plantation on Cane River, near Natchitoches. Kate Chopin returned to St. Louis in 1884 after Oscar's death two years prior. After leaving Louisiana she began to write. Her experiences in Louisiana and her correspondence with her husband's family in Cane River country inspired her writings. She published approximately 100 short stories in two collections: Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897); and two novels: At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899). The Awakening caused a scandal at the time of its publication. The criticism disheartened Chopin, and she wrote little else before her death. Although not a native, Chopin was considered a Louisiana writer by the northern reading public. Her early works represent the local color genre, emphasizing place, quaint characters and contrived plots. The Awakening transformed the genre. Chopin's work experienced a revival in the late 20th Century. Her writing focused on issues of gender and sexual definitions, which are modern feminist themes. The women's movement has recognized the revolt against socially prescribed roles in The Awakening.
Grace King (1852-1932) was born in New Orleans. She never married, and lived with her brothers and sisters in their family home. She wrote her first story in 1885 to counteract the negative image of New Orleans Creoles in the writings of George Washington Cable. King had a successful literary career as a writer of fiction, biography and history. Her stories focused on the experiences of New Orleans women during and after the Civil War and confronted the problems of race and gender in relation to regional political and social concerns. King was a leader of cultural development in New Orleans and was known in intellectual circles both in the North and Paris. Her principal works include three story collections: Monsieur Motte (1888), Tales of a Time and Place (1892), and Balcony Stories (1893); and the novel The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard (1916). She established herself as a historian with the publication of New Orleans, the Place and the People (1895) and Creole Families of New Orleans (1921). Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters was published posthumously in 1932.
George Washington Cable (1844-1925) was one of the best known writers of the postbellum period. Born in New Orleans, he quit school at the age of 14 to support his family after the death of his father. Following Confederate service in the Civil War, he became a reporter and columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He was dismissed from the paper in 1871, allegedly for declining to review a play. Cable's fiction focused on the sights, dialects and different peoples of Louisiana. His stories and books about New Orleans and the Louisiana plantation country were received in the North and Europe as important regional literature. He was severely criticized in New Orleans for his depiction of Southern attitudes and treatment of blacks. As a result, he left New Orleans in 1884, moving to Massachusetts where he remained for most of the rest of his life. His principal works include Old Creole Days (1879), The Grandissimes (1881), Dr. Servier (1884), and The Silent South (1885).
Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was born in Greece of an Irish father and a Greek mother. He fled a harsh life in England and arrived in Cincinnati in 1869, where he began writing for newspapers. Hearn came to New Orleans in 1878 and joined the staff of the New Orleans Item. He became the literary editor of the Times Democrat in 1881. During this time he became interested in the Creole dialect and collected Creole songs and proverbs. Hearn's sketches of New Orleans life earned him an enduring place among Louisiana writers. His works include Chita: A Memory of Last Island (1889), Gumbo Z'herbes: A Dictionary of Creole Proverbs (date unavailable), and a Creole cookbook. Hearn left New Orleans and died in Japan.

Antebellum Louisiana (to 1861)

In the first half of the 19th Century, Louisiana literature was dominated by French Creoles who saw literary, leisure time activities as the mark of a gentleman. Many wrote in French and were published locally, usually in small editions. Much of their work was little known outside Louisiana and has since disappeared.

In New Orleans, French-speaking free people of color wrote romantic poetry, stories, fables and other short sketches descriptive of Louisiana life. Their writings were not published until 1843, when Armand Lanusse and J.L. Marciacq began L'Album Littéraire, Journal des Jeunes Gens, Amateurs de la Littérature. The small French-language literary journal contained considerable material of high quality, but ceased publication within a few years.

Some of the significant authors of this period are:

Charles Gayarré (1805-1895) is known as "the Historian of Louisiana." He was born of distinguished Creole ancestry on a plantation near New Orleans. He combined a long legal and political career with a life of historical research and literary influence. As Louisiana Secretary of State from 1846 to 1850, Gayarrée was instrumental in bringing important French and Spanish documents concerning the history of Louisiana to the state. His four-volume History of Louisiana (1854-1866) is based on research in these sources. Gayarré was the author of numerous historical works, novels, and magazine and newspaper articles.
Armand Lanusse (1812-1867), a French-speaking free black, was a poet, teacher and civil rights pioneer. He was instrumental in the building of the Catholic School for Indigent Orphans of Color in New Orleans, and was the principal of the school from 1852 until his death. Lanusse established a monthly journal L'Album Littéraire, Journal des Jeunes Gens, Amateurs de la Littérature, which was the first publication of writings of African Americans in Louisiana. In 1845, he compiled Les Cenelles, which contained 82 poems written by 17 black poets, including 18 poems by Lanusse. It was the first anthology of African-American verse.
Adrien Emmanuel Rouquete (1813-1887), a clergyman, poet and missionary, was born in New Orleans and raised in St. Tammany Parish. He studied in France and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1845. In 1859 he established a mission at Bayou Lacombe in St. Tammany Parish and devoted his ministry to the Choctaw Indians. Rouquete's first major work of poetry, Les Savanes, was published in 1841 in New Orleans and Paris. His most noteworthy literary publications were La Thébaïde (1852), L'Antoniade (1860) and La Nouvelle Atala (1879).

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