The OT Book Club and Literary Society, special Mardi Gras edition

Feel free to discuss old books, new books, good books, bad books...



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From LSU Press

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In the years following World War I, the New Orleans French Quarter attracted artists and writers with its low rents, faded charm, and colorful street life. By the 1920s Jackson Square had become the center of a vibrant if short-lived bohemia. A young William Faulkner and his roommate William Spratling, an artist who taught at Tulane University, resided among the “artful and crafty ones of the French Quarter.” In Dixie Bohemia John Shelton Reed introduces Faulkner’s circle of friends—ranging from the distinguished Sherwood Anderson to a gender-bending Mardi Gras costume designer—and brings to life the people and places of New Orleans in the Jazz Age.

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Lyle Saxon (1891–1946) was a respected New Orleans writer, and journalist who reported for The Times-Picayune.

Saxon lived in the French Quarter at 612 Royal St. starting in 1918; Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Roark Bradford, and Edmund Wilson visited.

He was an ardent student of the history of New Orleans and wrote 6 books on the subject. His most popular titles include "Fabulous New Orleans" recounting the city's celebrated past as set against his memories of his first Mardi Gras during the turn of the 20th century: "Gumbo Ya-Ya", an amazing and absolutely marvelous compilation of native folk stories from Louisiana, including the Loup Garou and the Lalaurie House: and "Old Louisiana", a local bestseller from its introduction in 1929.

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Read Gumbo Ya-Ya online

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New Orleans: The Place and the People by Grace King (1895)

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Grace King's book, though sacrificing scholarship to readability, is by no means devoid of interest, a mirror not only of New Orleans' past, but, tellingly, of the author's own time...

she has written a woman's history of the Crescent City, inevitably more balanced than the standard enumeration of explorers, forts and buildings, conquests, battles, and politics; she succeeds in giving us whole the fabric of New Orleans society, highlighting the individual contributions, often by women, that made the city what it was in her time.

More surprisingly, if less overtly and despite the prejudices of her age, she has given us a largely sympathetic view of the black history of the city, devoting a significant portion of her text to the subject

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Read it online

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The pre-Internet Bible for NO foodies:



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The first Underground Gourmet New Orleans guidebooks first appeared in 1970, as part of a series originating in New York City, published by Simon and Schuster. The ambitious and food-obsessed Collin wrote to the publishing company to ask if he might do a New Orleans version, and to his surprise, the publishers awarded the as-yet-unproven restaurant critic the contract.

Collin enthusiastically rose to the challenge, tirelessly researching, eating, and exploring the food of his adopted city, drawing from luxury epicurean palaces, low-rent poboy joints, and ethnic restaurants in almost equal numbers. The resulting guide was written in Collin’s characteristically laissez-faire style, perfectly suited to the character of the Crescent City – the book proved an immediate success. Opinionated, hyper-intelligent, and adventurous, the Underground Gourmet books provided a fantastic introduction to the city’s food for tourists and locals alike.

Collin was an adventurous eater. His book was one of the first to devote attention and affection to the city’s smaller hole-in-the-wall restaurants, moving beyond the traditional French-Creole stalwarts into the soul food joints, poboy houses, and working man’s lunch-spots of the general public. Collins didn’t mince words or hang fire on lousy restaurants, either: one chapter is, after all, entitled “The Great Center City Disaster Area,” enumerating Collin’s justifiable disdain for the poor food served to the business lunch set (one can only hope that matters have improved). Collin’s disapproving descriptions include such damnations as “Keystone Kops levels of amateurism,” “watery Northern coffee,” and just plain “absolutely awful.”

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A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul.



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Previous meetings of the society:

10-16

11-11

11-25

12-9

12-16

1-7

1-20

2-10


"There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag; and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty; and vice versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you." -- Doris Lessing


London bookstore after an air raid, 1940: