Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s

Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s. By John Shelton Reed. Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. Pp. [x], 334. $38.00, ISBN 978-08071-4764-1.) It started as private joke, a teasing to novelist Sherwood Anderson of Winesburg, Ohio (1919) fame, by two young artists named Bill (pp. 1, 3). Anderson, with his third wife in tow, moved from Chicago to New Orleans's French Quarter in the 1920s. The tribute was a slim, amateurish book with the tongue-in-cheek title Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles: A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans (1926). Only two of the people in its forty-three portraits, biographical and sketched, were Creoles, and none (save Anderson) were particularly famous--at least not yet. William Faulkner, one of the pranksters, would achieve Nobel Prize celebrity. The other cutup was William Spratling, Faulkner's roommate in a French Quarter garret where they made a game of pinging pedestrians with a pump-action BB gun. Spratling later won acclaim in Taxco, Mexico, for his silver jewelry designs. John Shelton Reed is incapable of writing dull books, and Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s, an absorbing expansion of his 2011 Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University, is no exception. A sociologist with a historian's instinct for evidence and irony, Reed is quick to admit that the dozen or so writers, artists, and actors who congregated in the Vieux Carre during Prohibition, rubbing shoulders with early preservationists and a bevy of slumming debutantes, hardly qualified as a sociological group. But they were a social circle by virtue of common interests, shared friendships, and connections to the same institutions. Tulane University, in particular its School of Architecture and the Newcomb College Art School, assembled a lot of the talent. So did New Orleans's hypercompetitive newspaper scene, which kept tabs on their doings in the daily prints. Then there were the institutions the so-called Famous Creoles themselves created, such as the short-lived literary magazine the Double Dealer, which attracted early work by Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Thornton Wilder while serving as flophouse for migratory poets (p. 43). Setting the cultural tone were the Arts and Crafts Club, which no longer exists, and Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre, which does. All three entities--magazine, studio, and theater--were funded by wealthy Uptown families, many of them Jewish, whose patronage was essential to survival. One other link tied these faux Creoles together: a self-conscious sense of creating a sort of vest-pocket facsimile of Greenwich Village and the Left Bank (p. …

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