The author moved to New Orleans January 1, 2000 and had moved away before Hurricane Katrina. This book began with the letters he wrote to friends about his life as he lived it in New Orleans and what he learned of the city and its people.
Shortly after Grace King wrote her first stories in post-Reconstruction New Orleans, she entered a world of famous figures and literary giants greater than she could ever have imagined. Notable writers and publishers of the Northeast bolstered her career, and she began a decades-long friendship with Mark Twain and his family that was as unlikely as it was remarkable. Beginning in 1887, King paid long visits to the homes of friends and associates in New England and benefited from their extended circles. She interacted with her mentor, Charles Dudley Warner; writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Dean Howells; painter Frederic E. Church; suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker; Chaucer scholar Thomas Lounsbury; impresario Augustin Daly; actor Will Gillette;cleric Joseph Twichell; and other stars of the era. As compelling as a novel, this audacious story of King’s northern ties unfolds in eloquent letters. They hint at the fictional themes that would end up in her own art; they trace her development from literary novice to sophisticated businesswoman who leverages her own independence and success. Through excerpts from scores of new transcriptions, as well as contextualizing narrative and annotations, Miki Pfeffer weaves a cultural tapestry that includes King’s volatile southern family as it struggles to reclaim antebellum status and a Gilded Age northern community that ignores inevitable change. King’s correspondence with the Clemens family reveals incomparable affection. As a regular guest in their household, she quickly distinguished “Mark,” the rowdy public persona, from “Mr. Clemens,” the loving husband of Livy and father of Susy, Clara, and Jean, all of whom King came to know intimately. Their unguarded, casual revelations of heartbreaks and joys tell something more than the usual Twain lore, and they bring King into sharper focus. All of their existing letters are gathered here, many published for the first time. A New Orleans Author in Mark Twain’s Court paints a fascinating picture of the northern literary personalities who caused King’s budding career to blossom.
This deluxe edition brings to life the letters exchanged among Jane Austen's characters in Pride and Prejudice. Glassine pockets placed throughout the book contain removable replicas of 19 letters from the story. These powerful epistles include Lydia's announcement of her elopement, Mr. Collins's obsequious missives, and of course Darcy's painfully honest letter to Elizabeth. • Nothing captures Jane Austen's vivid emotion and keen wit better than her characters' correspondence. • Each letter is re-created with gorgeous calligraphy. • Letters are hand-folded with painstaking attention to historical detail. Perusing the letters will transport readers straight to the drawing room at Netherfield or the breakfast table at Longbourn. For anyone who loves Austen, and for anyone who still cherishes the joy of letter writing, this book illuminates a favorite story in a whole new way. • Step inside the world of Pride and Prejudice, one of the most beloved novels of all time. • Great Mother's Day, birthday, or holiday gift for diehard Jane Austen fans • A visually gorgeous book that will be at home on the shelf or on the coffee table • Add it to the shelf with books like What Would Jane Do?: Quips and Wisdom from Jane Austen by Potter Gift, Jane-a-Day: 5 Year Journal with 365 Witticisms by Jane Austen Edition by Potter Gift, and The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by Paula Byrne.
This is a beautiful introduction to the multicultural art and architecture of the "Crescent City," the cognomen given to the city nestled along a tight bend of the Mississippi River. In this introductory history, the reader is familiarized with many new terms reflecting the multiethnic complexity of the local population. The combination of African, French, and Anglo-American immigrants formed a unique Creole culture that has produced its own music, cuisine, art, and architecture, displayed superbly in a vast variety of photographs.
Lifelines: The Bowen Love Letters By: Susan Lee Ward “Katie Bowen was literate, observant, curious, compassionate, lucid, and philosophical. Her letters are informative, affectionate, and delightful to read. These letters constitute one of the finest pre-Civil War collections about military life.” Dr. Leo E. Oliva, Santa Fe Trail Historian Catherine “Katie” Bowen (nee Cary) was born and raised in Houlton, Maine, where her family ran a lumber and mercantile business. After a whirlwind courtship, Katie married a dashing young West Point graduate, Second Lieutenant Isaac Bowen, who left soon after the wedding for the Mexican War. When he returned safely from the war, Katie and Isaac embarked on the adventure of a lifetime: enjoying tea and discussing philosophy with Ralph Waldo Emerson; drinking a soldier’s cracker toddy and smoking cigars with General Zachary Taylor, Colonel Jefferson Davis, and Second Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant, one of Isaac’s West Point classmates; chatting fireside with Susan Shelby Magoffin, another well-known Santa Fe Trail traveler; sipping champagne at the White House with family friend, President Millard Fillmore; hearing crucial military intelligence from frontier scout, Kit Carson; and, being entertained with tall tales about Mississippi River life by steamboat Cub Pilot, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, later known as Mark Twain. The Bowen Love Letters reveal intimate details about young lives full of passion and adventure - lives that ended tragically in 1858 when Katie and Isaac were still in their early thirties.
A man known as the "Trashcan Wizard" sings and dances his way through the French Quarter in New Orleans, keeping his beloved city clean, until Hurricane Katrina's devastation nearly causes him to lose his spirit.
More than forty years afterleaving her native New Orleans as a young woman, Leta Weiss Marks awakened to the realization that her family history there was almost beyond the horizon of living memory. Rescuing it, for herself and posterity, became her mission and brought her home again. In a compelling, elegant blend of fact and fiction, Marks weaves a tapestry of family members and events, drawing mainly upon interviews with her nonagenarian mother and aunt. Letters, archival research, and Marks’s own recollections and imagination also contribute to the composition, which she calls “a song of myself and my family.” At the center are Marks’s mother and father, and the highs and lows of their courtship and marriage. Caroline Dreyfous was born into a prominent Jewish family of New Orleans; Leon Weiss, seventeen years her senior, always struggled to gain their acceptance. He was an ambitious, talented architect, the driving force in the famous firm of Weiss, Dreyfous and Seiferth, chosen by Huey Long to design the new state capitol and governor’s mansion, New Orleans’ Charity Hospital, and other landmarks. He also was implicated in the “Louisiana Scandals” and sentenced to two years in federal prison. Time’s Tapestry is in part Marks’s attempt to peel back her mother’s reticent yet unwavering loyalty toward her father and understand this man, who died when Marks was only twenty-one and preparing to move to Connecticut. Stories and memories of three generations of the Dreyfous branch of the family tree complete Marks’s portrait. She makes vivid not only the personalities of her kin but also the times in which they lived, conjuring the New Orleans of her great-grandfather, grandparents, parents, and own childhood—segregation, the alternate inclusion and exclusion of the Jewish community, the fervid politics of the Long era—and juxtaposing those scenes with her experiences as an adult returning to visit her family in a greatly changed city. Charming and evocative, a superb example of creative nonfiction—Time’s Tapestry makes for both an intimate family album and a priceless record of New Orleans’ cultural, social, and political history.
William C. C. Claiborne, the first governor of Orleans Territory, was at the hub of officials who grappled with the political, diplomatic, and administrative challenges that arose following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Letters both to and from Claiborne during the critical months of 1804–1805, mysteriously excluded in 1917 from Dunbar Rowland’s Official Letter Books of W. C. C. Claiborne, 1801–1816, are now made widely accessible, over half of them published here for the first time. To enhance appreciation of the letters, Jared William Bradley has furnished biographical sketches of thirty-one heretofore little-known individuals crucial to Claiborne’s correspondence, delineating their personalities and their contributions to the development of law and the establishment of American government in the French Creole society. Bradley also treats in four essays the origins and growth of the “Municipal,” or the New Orleans city council; two organizations of businessmen that were ensnared in the so-called Burr Conspiracy in 1807; and the early history of Fort St. Philip, which guarded access to New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico. Bradley’s essays joined with 218 of Claiborne’s letters makes Interim Appointment of incalculable value. It provides fresh insights into the political, constitutional, and social histories of Louisiana and the United States.