New Orleans: A Writer’s City

Review of New Orleans: A Writer’s City, T. R. Johnson (Cambridge UP, 2023)
by Gary Gautier

A massive archeological dig through the local history of a mysterious and fascinating city so rich in cultural textures that the surprises keep coming. More than just a good narrative history, Johnson’s book is a chock-full reference archive for students of literary history — not just the many writers, from world-class literati to dive bar poets, who crossed paths in these neighborhoods like ships in the night, but also the musicians and artists and cultural forces that added the juice to the narratives. With the historical flow punctuated by granular details and quick bits of literary analysis, you see not just books and writers, but the soil from which they sprung — the pain and nuance and rough joys driven by local circumstance, the addictions and excess and freewheeling play of identities – all the chaotic vanity fair of life that New Orleans offers to its long line of home-bred writers and smitten transients.

For the scholar, all this is perfect, and Johnson’s command of his material is nothing if not scholarly, but for the lay reader it may seem at times bogged down in minutiae, a kind of Old Testament overload of names and references. And the addition of music history as context is good, but to some it will seem digressive, an end in itself – understandable since Johnson, besides being a professor of English at Tulane University, hosts a jazz show on New Orleans’ local WWOZ radio. Between the moments of full engagement, there are moments where the reading seems laborious. So be it. The mass of accumulated value is worth it.

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