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The exotic aura of New Orleans was scarred forever by the hurricane of 2006 but this is a city that won’t die. Despite destruction and trauma, it struggles to morph into new forms.
The most up-to-date travel book is Frommer’s Portable New Orleans:A Full Post- Katrina Update 2006.
New Orleans has always been fertile ground for writers. It seems to encourage them like lush tropical foliage or illuminate the heart of a vision like the sun and books about New Orleans have always been found in almost every genre
“Literary New Orleans”, vignettes from 1722 to the present, edited by Judy Long, is a wonderful overview. You might want to delve further into such 19th century writers as Lafcadio Hearn, who lived in and wrote essays about both New Orleans and Japan, and Kate Chopin whose “The Awakening”, both novel and film, paints a picture of a woman’s personal search for happiness and fulfillment in a structured era. William Faulkner’s “Mosquito”, his second novel, was written in the 1920s when he lived on Pirate’s Alley and provides a wry look at what happens to hearts and souls on a private yacht trip across the Mississippi.
Among Zora Neale Huston’s many books about her African-American heritage is a story about Marie Laveau, the cunning healer called a voodoo sorceress by those who wanted to embellish local color
Playwright Tennessee Williams made the French Quarter famous in his classic play, “A Streetcar Named Desire”, in which a southern belle who has always depended on the kindness of strangers discovers the chaotic post World War II melting pot in the fierce virile person of her sister’s husband. Lillian Hellman also painted the family conflicts and racial subtext of that period in her play “Toys in the Attic”, as well as her memoir “Pentimento”.
Robert Penn Warren adapted the life of Huey Long, Louisiana’s governor, in “All The King’s Men”, played in films first by Broderick Crawford, then by Sean Penn. John Kennedy O’Toole won a posthumous Pulitzer for “A Confederacy of Dunces”, an off-beat satire on city life. Ellen Gilchrist brings a funny sexy sensibility to her collected short stories, “In The Land of the Dreamy Dreams”. Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer” is less about the movies than about a man whose life revolves around sitting in the dark watching other people’s dreams.
New Orleans is the scene of some wonderful mystery series, whose writers include Julie Smith whose Edgar Award-winning “New Orleans Mourning”, set during Mardi Gras and exposing the scars of racially mixed heritage, marks the debut of lanky society girl turned cop Skip Langdon. Benjamin January, the hero of Barbara Hambly’s fascinating historical mystery series, is a man of color, a musician and a doctor struggling to be himself in the 18th century French Quarter. James Lee Burke’s books begin up country where retired cop Dave Robicheaux fights alcoholism and the crooks who killed his wife. His newest, “The Tin Roof Blowdown” reassigns Robicheaux to the horrors of post-Katrina New Orleans further devastated by manmade corruption and vandalism.