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• Classic-Fiction

• To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) Best actor, Gregory Peck, is Atticus Finch.

• Interview With a Vampire (1994) An unintentional comedy. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt vamp around New Orleans in wigs and makeup.

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Perhaps no writer is better associated with New Orleans than Tennessee Williams, a playwright who gave us the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He also won a Tony award for best play with The Rose Tattoo. When he moved to New Orleans in 1939 he was dead broke. But President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration was in the business of funding struggling writers through the Writers and Arts Program, and Williams won a grant. During those days he would write from 5am to 11am and then hit Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop to drink with his fellow artists while a pianist played whatever sheet music Williams brought him that day. This candle-lit, hole-in-the-wall is purported to have been smuggler Jean Laffite’s workshop and French Quarter hideout. Today the piano music is gone, but it remains a grungy oasis of the authentic on cheese ball Bourbon St.

Williams’ fortunes took a significant turn skyward when he penned Streetcar at 632½ St Peter, a town-home with a wide veranda in the French Quarter – or as Williams called it, Little Bohemia. Soon Tennessee was flush with cash, and he would often enjoy a late brandy at Napoleon House, an attractive bar set in a courtyard building erected in 1797. It also has a terrific menu if you’re hungry. On hot days sit in the courtyard and order a scoop of shrimp remoulade served in a half avocado. When Williams craved a bit of luxury, he checked into the Maison de Ville. Ask for Room 9 – that was Williams’ suite.

William Faulkner also got his start in the Crescent City. Fellow author Sherwood Anderson hosted literary salons at his 1920s residence, 540 St Peter, where Faulkner first earned critical praise. Gertrude Stein, Carl Sandburg and John Dos Passos were also launched by Anderson’s salons. Anderson’s was not the first, or the only, exclusive literature salon in the Quarter. The turn-of-the-century Writers Club, led by authors Grace King and Kate Chopin, was for women only. But it was Anderson who buoyed young William with confidence, and convinced him to hole up on Pirate’s Alley and write his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, in 1926. Today, the canary-yellow building where Faulkner wrote the novel has been converted into a dusty new-and-used bookseller, Faulkner House Books. Poke around for first editions!

Modern literature has been nourished by New Orleans as well, or have you forgotten the Vampire Lestat? He, and all of his nefarious French Quarter adventures were created at the rambling and leafy Anne Rice House in the Garden District. And don’t leave until you’ve paid homage to that overweight, counter–cultural, hot-dog selling, rabble-rousing elitist, Ignatius J Reilly, at his statue on Canal St. Ignatius is immortalized in the brilliant Confederacy of Dunce, written by local author John Kennedy Toole (he actually wrote the book in Lafayette) and published after Toole’s suicide. It hasn’t yet made it to the screen despite decades of interest from a parade of comics including John Belushi and Will Ferrell. Perhaps it’s just as well. Ignatius would have likely found the whole red carpet thing way beneath him.

Adam Skolnick

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TRIP INFORMATION

GETTING THERE

Fly into Savannah and move northwest through Alabama and Mississippi before turning south to New Orleans.

DO

540 St Peter

A literary landmark you’ll enjoy curbside, this is the site of Sherwood Anderson’s legendary salons. 540 St Peter St, New Orleans;

632½ St Peter

An early–French Quarter home of Tennessee Williams. Observe it from the street. 632½ St Peter St, New Orleans;

Andalusia

Visit the house and farm where Flannery O’Connor was raised and wrote her masterworks. 800-653-1804; www.andalusiafarm.org; Greene St, Milledgeville; admission by donation; tours by appointment only;