Walker Percy, from The Moviegoer (1961; National Book Award for Fiction, 1962)
“...it is no small thing for me to make a trip, travel hundreds of miles across the country by night to a strange place and come out where there is a different smell in the air and people have a different way of sticking themselves into the world…. It is nothing to [Uncle Jules] to close his eyes in New Orleans and wake up in San Francisco and think the same thoughts on Telegraph Hill that he thought on Carondelet Street. Me, it is my fortune and misfortune to know how the spirit-presence of a strange place can enrich a man or rob a man but never leave him alone, how, if a man travels light to a hundred strange cities and cares nothing for the risk he takes, he may find himself No one and Nowhere.”
“The doctor had never been inside an antebellum mansion until that spring in New Orleans...He liked to pause on the marble steps and look up at the Doric capitals, wreathed as they were by those drowsy fragrant blossoms. The sun came in thin dusty shafts through the twisting branches. Bees sang in the tangle of brilliant green leaves beneath the peeling cornices. Never mind that it was so somber here, so damp.”
Mark Twain, from chapters on New Orleans in Life on the Mississippi (1883)
“…the people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water. Neither can they conveniently have cellars, or graves, the town being built upon 'made' ground; so they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of the others…
They bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaults have a resemblance to houses—sometimes to temples; are built of marble, generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely; they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when one moves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees their white roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand, the phrase 'city of the dead' has all at once a meaning to him.”
(New Orleans is covered in chapters 41-46 of Life on the Mississippi)
Lafcadio Hearn, from “New Orleans in Wet Weather” (1877), collected in Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (2001)
“The dampness of New Orleans upon a wet day impresses one as something phenomenal. You do not know in the North what such dampness is. It descends from the clouds and arises from the soil simultaneously; it exudes from wood-work; it perspires from stone. It is spectral, mysterious, inexplicable. Strong walls and stout doors can not keep it from entering; windows and doors can not exclude it. You might as well try to lock out a ghost.”
Truman Capote, from “New Orleans,” in Portraits and Observations (2007)
“I want a big fat mama, yes yes! Shotgun’s fingers, long as bananas, thick as dill pickles, pound the keys, and his foot, pounding the floor, shakes the café. Shotgun! The biggest show in town! Can’t sing worth a damn, but man, can he rattle that piano—listen: She’s cool in the summer and warm in the fall, she’s a four-season mama and that ain’t all…"
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