New Orleans Literature

For more than three centuries, a remarkably diverse group of writers have had their creative juices stimulated by New Orleans and its environs, drawing upon the city as setting, inspiration, and example in the production of virtually every literary genre. Many of these authors, particularly those writing since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, have tried to predict the city’s future or pronounce its doom. 

Over three meetings, Logan Brown, Rice University Professor in the Practice of English and Humanities  will guide us through some of the more notable instances of this New Orleans writing and try to understand the relation between them and the city’s languages, ethnic identities, musical heritage, visual arts, festivals, and cuisines. 

April 8: A brief overview of some of the more notable New Orleans writers (e.g., William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Anne Rice) before homing in on some short stories by Eudora Welty and Maurice Carlos Ruffin. In the two Welty stories “The Purple Hat” and “No Place for You, My Love,” the Mississippi author writes as an outsider, a visitor, to New Orleans. By contrast, the native New Orleanian Ruffin explores the perspectives of a variety of fellow New Orleanians in his recent story collection, The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You.

April 15: A review of an “odd couple” of New Orleans books: Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. The two protagonists of these novels, Binx Bolling and Ignatius Reilly, are vastly different in many ways, but each has captured the imagination of a vast number of New Orleanians who find the pair wonderful avatars for their city.  We will talk some about the curious role that Walker Percy had in getting Toole’s novel published posthumously. Almost undoubtedly, without Percy’s help, the novel would never have appeared in print. 

In the third meeting, currently planned for the fall of 2026, we will look at Anne Rice’s The Feast of All Saints, an extraordinary historical novel set in early nineteenth-century New Orleans. Spoiler alert: there are no vampires in the novel.

New Orleans is also notable for the number of cocktail recipes that have originated there. We will enjoy one of those libations each class to encourage our own creative attempts to understand this literary fascination with the “Accidental City,” the Big Easy, the Big Sleazy, NOLA, or just plain old New Orleans. 

Logan Browning is a specialist in Victorian literature and publishing history, and a contributor to the Oxford Reader’s Companion to Charles Dickens, The Oxford Handbook on Dickens, and other scholarly journals and reference works. He is a faculty member of the Dickens Universe, housed at the University of California Santa Cruz. His current research also includes the study of writing in and about New Orleans. He is advisory editor and occasional reviewer for the Hopkins Review and has been an occasional reviewer for the Houston Chronicle. He has served as a member of the board of directors of the Friends of Fondren Library at Rice, and was president of the Houston Philosophical Society in their centennial year 2019-2020.