The great thing about this account of the artists and intellectuals in and around New Orleans’s French Quarter during the 1920s is that it upends nearly every assumption commonly made about the American South—even the true ones. The early-20th-century South may have produced the odd isolated genius, but it did not generate anything of cultural distinction. True enough. And yet for a decade, New Orleans—by far the largest city in the South with 400,000 people—became a hothouse of young, or mostly young, playwrights, novelists, musicians, painters, archaeologists, poets, and journalists.
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