The literary history of the St. Claude corridor, an historically hardscrabble, working-class neighborhood downriver from the French Quarter, reflects its distance from the relatively elite and glamorous Quarter. After sketching the history of the built environment and its major cultural and political flashpoints, from Fats Domino and Ruby Bridges to the Black Panthers and Hurricane Katrina, the chapter considers first the major writing to have originated in the Lower 9th Ward (Marcus B. Christian, Kalamu Ya Salaam), then the Desire neighborhood (Cheekie Nero, Jed Horne), St. Roch (Alice Dunbar-Nelson), and Bywater (Tennessee Williams, Nelson Algren, Seth Morgan, Valerie Martin). Much of this writing can be read through the motif of children, particularly faith in their innocence as a key to a more prosperous future.

To Nelson Algren, the alleys, backstreets, and pool halls of Chicago constituted a frontier in their own right, with the Polish triangle of Wabanasia, Milwaukee, and Division forming the bulwark of a neighborhood peopled by those whose pulses could only be read in terms of the class, race, and ethnicity which defined their very existence. These were the multitude of Americans who are not recognized, who are largely excluded from American society, and Algren assumed the task of ensuring their visibility. Yet Algren’s insistence that the excluded were worth our attention, that their lives were important, came at a time when American criticism was moving away from the social realism of his work. By the 1950s, the propagation of monolithic values rooted in the premise of classless consumption formed a consensus that shifted the reality of class to a point where those who continued to address it were regarded at best as curiosities. Like the subject of his fiction, then, Algren’s work was excluded, moved to the periphery, as this important author fell victim to the myths of Cold War homogeneity.

Recent research by climate scientists suggest that New Orleans, much of which is below sea level and protected from the sea only by a rapidly eroding marshland, may someday become uninhabitable. The city’s literature of the last few decades has been preoccupied with the theme of fatalism and apocalypse, and the deadly epidemics of the nineteenth century have provided rich symbolic terrain for figuring the troubles that “plague” the city and that will someday mean its end. Some recent work by women of color – notably Erna Brodber and Brenda Marie Osbey – delineates a different literary project, one appropriate to a post-apocalyptic diaspora, namely the work of remembering. Both the traditional fatalism and this emerging interest in memory will likely be central themes to watch for in the major literature associated with the New Orleans in coming decades.