A key moment in the history of the dynamic between New Orleans and the major cultural hubs of the Northeast and Europe occurred with the emergence of a “little” magazine in 1921 called the Double Dealer, which published the literary figures who would define the aesthetic and cultural movement known as modernism. The final issues of the magazine gave significant exposure to a writer who was, until then, little known – William Faulkner. The magazine also published Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, and Thornton Wilder. Though it faltered and finally folded after just a handful of years, it managed to link New Orleans to the most elite cultural channels of the wider world in roughly the same moment that the indigenous music of the city – jazz – came to widespread recognition.

No place was more important to Tennessee Williams than New Orleans, beginning with his first, brief stay as a young man, through the end of his life, some four decades later. He engaged the city through one-act plays, short stories, verse, and, of course, in A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams was able to express his inner conflicts over whether and how to restrain his appetite for sensual experience through the rich array of characters and scenarios he encountered in daily life around the city. As such, the city became something like a mirror in which he discovered his soul, a near perfect fusion of a particular place with a particular artist’s sensibility.