Literary New Orleans — A City That Writes Itself

William Faulkner wrote his first novel at Pirate's Alley. Tennessee Williams found his voice on Toulouse Street. Walker Percy set *The Moviegoer* in Gentilly. Kate Chopin wrote *The Awakening* on Magazine Street. Anne Rice built a vampire empire from a Garden District mansion. New Orleans has produced more significant American writers per square mile than any city except New York. The city's literary density is not accidental. New Orleans was the third most populous American city in 1840, the wealthiest port in the antebellum South, and a place where French, Spanish, African, and Anglo cultures collided in ways that produced new forms. The city survived yellow fever epidemics that killed over 150,000 residents in the nineteenth century. It endured occupation during the Civil War, the collapse of Reconstruction, and the imposition of Jim Crow. It flooded catastrophically in 2005 when the federal levee system failed during Hurricane Katrina, displacing 800,000 people. The city that writes itself does so because survival here has always required invention. The Tennessee Williams Literary Festival runs annually in March in the French Quarter. Faulkner House Books at 624 Pirate's Alley is both a working bookshop and a literary landmark. The festival and the bookshop together mark what the writers made here: a tradition of prose that does not turn away from heat, history, proximity to death, or the insistence on pleasure. The body of literature that came from New Orleans could not have been written anywhere else.