Yusef Komunyakaa is an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.In his poetry, Yusef Komunyakaa weaves together personal narrative, jazz rhythms, and vernacular language to create complex images of life in peace and in war.
“The story our country tells about the Civil War often flattens some of its otherwise complex realities,” writes New Orleans native Smith, a staff writer for the Atlantic. He notes the U.S. is “at an inflection point, in which there is a willingness to more fully grapple with the legacy of slavery and how it shaped the world we live in today.” However, while “some places have attempted to tell the truth about their proximity to slavery and its aftermath,” others have refused. For this book, the author traveled to nine sites, eight in the U.S. and one in Dakar, Senegal, “to understand how each reckons with its relationship to the history of American slavery.” The result is a devastating portrait with unforgettable details. At the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, historians have labored to help visitors close “the yawning gap on slavery” in their educations—“a hammer attempting to unbend four centuries of crooked nails.” By contrast, the Angola Museum at the Louisiana State Penitentiary has a gift shop with such souvenirs as “a white mug with the silhouette of a guard sitting in a watchtower surrounded by fencing.” When Smith asked his White tour guide to comment on Angola’s role in slavery, the guide replied, “I can’t change that.” At these places and other sites such as Monticello, Galveston Island, and New York City, the author conducted interviews with tour guides, visitors, and others to paint a vivid portrait of the extent to which venues have attempted to redress past wrongs. Smith concludes with a moving epilogue about taking his grandparents to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The trip elicited painful stories from their childhoods, such as his grandmother recalling walking home from school as White children in buses threw ice cream at her and hurled vicious epithets.
“A brilliant, vital work about “a crime that is still unfolding.” Kirkus Review
Walker Percy’s grandfather committed suicide, as did his 40-year-old father on July 9, 1929. One of the greatest traumas of Walker Percy’s life was to deal with his father’s death, which his character, Will Barrett, does in a fictional way in The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming.
After his father’s death, Percy and his family went to live for a year with his grandmother in Athens, Georgia, before accepting the invitation of William Alexander Percy to live in Greenville, Mississippi. While in Greenville, Percy’s mother drowned when her car plunged into a small creek (her son, Walker, privately believed his mother, too, had committed suicide). After graduation, Percy enrolled in the fall of 1933 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, focusing on chemistry, an academic path that eventually led to the beginning of medical studies in 1937 at the College of Physicians & Surgeons of Columbia University in New York City. While there, Percy underwent psychological therapy to help with the stress of the suicides of his father, grandfather, and most likely, of his mother.
While an intern at Bellevue Hospital in New York, Percy contracted tuberculosis. He required complete bed rest, and during this time he started reading theology, philosophy, and literature, particularly the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, Leo Tolstoy, and Feodor Dostoevsky. Realizing that almost no one would consult a physician who had tuberculosis, Percy returned to the South, specifically to New Orleans, where he abandoned medicine as a career.
Soon after, Percy, his wife, and adopted daughter, Mary Pratt, moved to Covington, Louisiana, a quiet town across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. He lived there for the rest of his life. Covington and the surrounding areas served as Percy’s imaginative base. In an essay entitled “Why I Live Where I Live,” Percy described Covington as a cheerful, out-of-the-ordinary town with an “admirable tradition of orneriness and dissent.”
In short, according to Percy, he could breathe clean air in Covington, eat boiled crawfish, enjoy his family life, visit friends—and write fiction while looking out his study window. Like his friend and fellow writer, Eudora Welty of Jackson, Mississippi, Percy wanted to live as normal a life as possible.
Percy’s most famous novel, The Moviegoer, was finished in the spring of 1959 and was published in 1961. It won the National Book Award for fiction the following year, drawing on the landscape of New Orleans and the Mississippi River Basin. Percy went on to write five other novels—The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1971), Lancelot (1977), The Second Coming (1980), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987)—as well as two works of nonfiction, The Message in the Bottle (1975) and Lost in the Cosmos (1983).
Walker Percy died from prostate cancer on May 10, 1990 and is buried in the cemetery of St. Joseph’s Abbey outside Covington, Louisiana.
Fifty years after John Kennedy Toole died, ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ lives on
By Colin Fleming March 26, 2019
On March 26, 1969, John Kennedy Toole used a garden hose to pump exhaust fumes into his car. He wouldn’t live to see the success of his novel, “A Confederacy of Dunces,” which he had tried and failed to get published.
The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, but it also became beloved by audiences who connected with the romp of a picaresque, a dialect-driven New Orleans yarn about a gaseous, garrulous, non-fool-abider, would-be philosopher named Ignatius J. Reilly who lives with his mother. She prevails upon him to get a job — correctly concluding that quoting Boethius won’t pay any bills — and he gloweringly lowers himself to join the ranks of the employed, working at a hot dog cart where he eats more frankfurters than he peddles, and sometimes incites low-level riots.
Toole began “Dunces” after serving in the military in Puerto Rico and sent a manuscript to Simon & Schuster, where it landed in the hands of renowned editor Robert Gottlieb. He remarked that he believed Toole talented but that the novel had no point. The two entered a lengthy back-and-forth, with Toole trying to maintain his patience. Ultimately, the author decided that he did not want to completely overhaul the work on the off chance that Gottlieb would publish it.
After Toole’s death, his mother took up the cause of getting her son’s novel to the masses. She tried a handful more publishers over the next five years before buttonholing author Walker Percy, who was teaching at Loyola University in New Orleans; to stop this woman from continuing to bother him, he read the book and was knocked into a tizzy over its quality.
Despite Walker Percy putting his weight behind it, it took years before he could persuade a small academic press to put out the book, basically without edits. It was like a printed-out, late stage draft, which nevertheless won the Pulitzer Prize.
Ernest James Gaines was born January 15, 1933, on River Lake Plantation in Oscar, a small town in Pointe Coupee Parish, near New Roads, Louisiana. The oldest of twelve children, he was raised by his great-aunt, Augusteen Jefferson, who provided the inspiration for Miss Jane Pittman, as well as other strong black female characters, such as Miss Emma and Tante Lou in Lesson. Gaines’ birthplace serves as the model for his fictional world of Bayonne and St. Raphael Parish.
He is perhaps best known for his 1971 novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which was made into a TV movie and won several Emmys. In May 1999, HBO debuted its made-for-television movie of A Lesson Before Dying.
Growing up in Louisiana and attending rural schools, Gaines began working in the fields, earning fifty cents a day, when he was eight years old. In 1945, he started attending St. Augustine Middle School for Catholic African-American children, in nearby New Roads, Louisiana, and became active in staging plays for the local church.
Ernest Gaines continued his chronicle of rural Louisiana in his 2017 novella, The Tragedy of Brady Sims, the painful story of man who tries to keep the peace in a racially divided town by enforcing his own brand of justice. Ernest Gaines died peacefully at his home in Louisiana at the age of 86.
Anne Rice was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. The French Quarter provided the setting for her first novel, Interview with the Vampire. And her ante-bellum house in the Garden District was the fictional home of her imaginary Mayfair Witches.
Rice is the author of over 30 novels. Her first novel, Interview with the Vampire, was published in 1976 and has gone on to become one of the best-selling novels of all time. She continued her saga of the Vampire Lestat in a series of books, collectively known as The Vampire Chronicles, which have had both great mainstream and cult followings. Interview with the Vampire was made into a motion picture in 1994, directed by Neil Jordan, and starring Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Kirsten Dunst and Antonio Banderas. Anne’s novel, Feast of All Saints about the free people of color of ante-bellum New Orleans became a Showtime mini series in 2001 and is available now on DVD. The script for the mini series by John Wilder was a faithful adaptation of the novel. Anne Rice is also the author of other novels, including The Witching Hour, Servant of the Bones, Merrick, Blackwood Farm, Blood Canticle, Violin, and Cry to Heaven.
Robert Harling grew up in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and lost his sister and “best friend” to diabetes in 1985. He turned the experience into the iconic stage play Steel Magnolias, which is still performed all over the world. The subsequent movie launched Harling’s career as a screenwriter, and since then he’s written Soapdish and The First Wives Club, among other hits.
James Lee Burke grew up on the Texas-Louisiana gulf coast. He attended Southwestern Louisiana Institute and over the years he worked as a landman for Sinclair Oil Company, pipeliner, land surveyor, newspaper reporter, college English professor, social worker on Skid Row in Los Angeles, clerk for the Louisiana Employment Service, and instructor in the U. S. Job Corps.
Burke’s work has been awarded an Edgar twice for Best Crime Novel of the Year. He has also been a recipient of a Breadloaf and Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA grant. Three of his novels, Heaven’s Prisoners, Two For Texas and In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead have been made into motion pictures. His short stories have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, New Stories From the South, Best American Short Stories, Antioch Review, Southern Review, and The Kenyon Review. His novel The Lost Get-Back Boogie was rejected 111 times over a period of nine years, and upon publication by Louisiana State University press was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.