The world from Jackson Square : a New Orleans reader
Etolia S. Basso (Editor), Hamilton Basso, Stefan Salter (Typographer, Book designer), Ronald Clyne (Bookjacket designer)
Romantic New Orleans, picturesque New Orleans, carefree New Orleans. The adjectives have been come across so often, and we have become so suspicious of adjectives, that our first impulse is to have none of them. We feel like saying, in our determination not to be taken in, that no place--not even Paris and Carcassonne and Venice at carnival time, all rolled into one--could be as romantic, as picturesque, and as carefree as that! This is true, of course, but it is also true, as the pages of this volume show, that the adjectives cannot be wholly denied. Ever since New Orleans first entered the American imagination, during the time when the territory later to be acquired by the Louisiana Purchase was under the rule of France, it has been regarded as a place apart; for over a hundred and fifty years now, it has stood as a symbol of exotic alienness in the national mind. That it still does so, as indeed it does, would seem to indicate that it could hardly live down its past, even if it wanted to, and that its legend, rank and luxuriant as one of its gardens in June, has been woven into the larger legend of America. The pages that follow, then, would appear to have more than their own interest and value. Telling the story of New Orleans--a good story in itself--they also tell, although more obliquely, a large part of the story of a continent. We have to consider the latter story, I believe, in order to understand why this city near the mouth of the Mississippi has remained, over the generations, a sort of separate, independent, sun-soaked principality--the good place and the land of heart's desire
Print Book, English, 1948
Farrar, Straus and Company, New York, 1948