New Orleans By the Book

There's no better way for adolescents and adults to get a look behind the masque of New Orleans' dazzling street festivals and sultry surface than to read Kate Chopin's tragedy The Awakening or John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer-prizewinning A Confederacy of Dunces, an epic comedy that captures the city's unique vernacular and customs.

Toole was a doctoral candidate at Tulane University, and many of his papers, including the manuscript for Confederacy, are on public display in the university archives. Toole grew up nearby, at 390 Audubon Street, and the surrounding Uptown neighborhood is one of New Orleans' flossiest. Beautiful Audubon Park is rich in native flora, including centuries-old live oaks, and the zoo will captivate family members too young to enjoy Toole or trees.

A $1 ride on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar takes visitors toward the French Quarter. The renowned Milton H. Latter Memorial Library at Soniat and St. Charles Avenue, which is on the way, is where Toole shelved books as a teen. With its crystal chandeliers, opulent ceiling murals and manicured grounds, this library takes reading to new heights of elegance.

Toole's insouciant, larger-than-life "suspicious character," Ignatius J. Reilly, memorialized in bronze, loiters in perpetuity outside the former D.H. Holmes department store, now the Chateau Sonesta Hotel. The nearby Palace Cafe, once Werlein's for Music, where Reilly bought his lute string, is a good place to lunch. The cafe's player piano will entertain small fry, and the food will please the grownups. True Toole aficionados will buy a hot dog on the street in homage to Reilly's brief, catastrophic career as a vendor of frankfurters made of "rubber, cereal, tripe. Who knows?"

Toole never won literary recognition during his life; Confederacy wasn't published until more than a decade after his suicide in 1969. Kate Chopin is another New Orleans writer whose masterpiece--The Awakening--went unappreciated until after her death in 1904. Her achingly wistful novel offers a counterpoint to Toole's farce. Readers can pick up Chopin's trail on the outskirts of the French Quarter, where her heroine, Edna Pontellier, lived on Esplanade Avenue. The Pontellier home is thought to have been modeled on the Claiborne Mansion, now an expensive bed-and-breakfast, in the adjacent Faubourg Marigny neighborhood. When Edna left her husband and moved around the corner in pursuit of freedom, her new home was probably in the bohemian section.

Chopin and her husband Oscar lived with their five sons (a daughter was born later) at 1413 Louisiana Avenue, on the edge of the wealthy, floral-scented Garden District. The house is not open to the public, but this architecturally noteworthy area is worth a stroll.

Edna's "awakening" begins--and ends --at Grand Isle on the Gulf of Mexico, a two-hour drive south of New Orleans. A deadly hurricane in 1893 leveled much of the island, but the smooth beaches and sultry subtropical climate remain unchanged. It is not hard to imagine Edna in her final swim, lured by "the voice of the sea...seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude."

When Oscar Chopin's business failed, he moved his family to Cloutierville, a day's drive from Grand Isle. Kate set the town aflutter by wearing trousers, playing cards, walking about unescorted, smoking in public, drinking beer and trying to liberate the women. Her home now houses the Bayou Folk Museum.

In addition to Chopin memorabilia, local-history artifacts and scrapbooks fill the museum. In one room hangs a portrait of Mr. McAlphen, a resident of the area said to have been Harriet Beecher Stowe's inspiration for the hateful Simon Legree of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Legend has it that Stowe once stayed at a nearby plantation, now called Little Eva, where the cook fed her stories about the cruelty McAlphen inflicted on his slaves.

A worthwhile stop before returning to New Orleans is the nearby Melrose Plantation, once owned by freed slave Marie Therese Coincoin and her son, who kept slaves themselves and set up a militia to defend the Confederacy. Melrose eventually ended up in the hands of arts patron Cammie Garrett Henry, who turned the old slave quarters into a writers' colony. Her guests included Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck.

Laura Plantation, about 35 miles west of New Orleans, offers visitors a chance to examine plantation life from a slave's perspective. It was here that the West African folk tales about Brer Rabbit, the savvy hare who outwits his bigger adversaries, were recorded by Alcee Fortier. Along with popular variations like Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus tales, they have delighted smart children of all colors for generations.