In February 1896, William Sydney Porter was indicted for embezzlement of funds from the First National Bank in Austin, Texas, where he had been recently employed. In July of that year, instead of…

Le Petit Salon was once the most exclusive and prestigious private women’s organization in New Orleans. Founded in 1924 and described as a “circle of distinguished ladies,” the Salon quickly became an…

In his over 40 years living in New Orleans, famed playwright Tennessee Williams resided in several French Quarter locations. Arriving in New Orleans in 1938, a 28-year-old Williams rented a room at…

In 1891, Lyle Saxon was born in Baton Rouge and, after attending Louisiana State University, moved to New Orleans to become a newspaper reporter. He played a pivotal role in the French Quarter…

“Blessed be these people,” Sherwood Anderson wrote in 1922 from his third-floor apartment in the Vieux Carré. “They know how to play. They are truly a people of culture.” Anderson, riding the crest of…

Today home to the Dryades YMCA, this beautiful building, erected in 1915, was the first New Orleans Public Library created to serve black New Orleanians and had the capacity to hold 10,000 books.

Gwen Bristow, though not originally from New Orleans, was a great contributor to both Southern literature and the Times-Picayune newspaper. She helped mold the face of Southern writing into what it is…

In the 1930s and 1940s, the center of New Orleans literary life resided at 7221 Zimple Street, the Basement Bookshop and Library. Tess Crager opened the store in a little yellow wood-frame building…

In 1965, sisters Rhoda Norman and Mary Kellogg opened the Maple Street Bookshop, the first in New Orleans to specialize in paperback books. As Tess Crager's Basement Bookshop had been in the 1930s and…

University of New Orleans 2010 History MA graduate Laurel Dorrance created a cartoon-style history of Oak Street's Comic Book Shop for the 2009 Po-Boy Fest History Center. The following is her…

The ashes of poet Everette Maddox are buried on the patio at the Maple Leaf Bar, which, in the last years of his life, he made his home. It was here that he founded the readings series, now known as…

After a long dry spell beginning in the early 1980s, poet Everette Maddox began writing again in 1988. The poems began to pour out of him, seeming to bubble up after the seven years in which he did…

The Maple Leaf reading series is the longest-running poetry reading series in New Orleans as well as the South. In 1979, famed local poet Everette Maddox began the series with sculptor Franz Heldner…