“He thoroughly knows and respects his subject, and his writing is clean lively, and, on occasion, warmly affecting.”
—New Yorker
“Christopher Hallowell is a skillful writer on natural history.”
—Doris Grumbach, New York Times Book Review
The sprawling marshland of the lower Mississippi has spawned one of the most interesting indigenous cultures in all America—the Cajuns. Since the eighteenth century, they have clung to their ways, including their remarkable French-based patois, their deep love of the land and water around them, their world-famous cuisine, and their enviable love of life.
Along with his affectionate and lyrical portrait of the people he came to know, Christopher Hallowell provides a history of the region, its geology, its settlement, and the efforts of land speculators and oil companies to develop it. People of the Bayou is a haunting record of a place in transition—another corner of American culture facing assimilation into the mainstream, a way of life that may be gone before we know it.