Since 1926, Pelican Publishing Company has been committed to publishing books of quality and permanence that enrich the lives of those who read them.
Historical
Children of Strangers is the powerful and moving novel of love in a community bound by race and class. Famie is a mulatto girl whose ancestors—free blacks—rivaled the white planters in wealth and culture. But on a Louisiana plantation in the 1920s, she is an outcast, rejected by whites because of her black ancestors and unwilling to associate with the sharecroppers who are descendants of slaves.
Images are expertly imbued into the mind by vivid description. In Chita, Lafcadio Hearn paints life on a marshy, eclectic Gulf Coast island in the middle of the nineteenth century. Chita is a young white girl who is orphaned by a shipwreck and then adopted by a Spanish family on the island. Languages, cultures, and people collide and meld into a nebulous, but distinctive, way of life. Paperback.
Beginning with Lee’s surrender and the subsequent assassination of Abraham Lincoln, The Clansman describes the anxiety and confusion of the years immediately after the South’s defeat. Between 1865 and 1870, the whole nation struggled with questions of justice and revenge, forgiveness and reparation. With 350,000 Southern soldiers dead, ensuring the welfare of their widows and orphans, as well as the rest of the population, was of paramount concern to the survivors.
In the “Vieux Carré” of New Orleans, the last remnant of old Creole life in the city, Geoffrey Chester, a young lawyer, is struck by the charm of a Creole beauty whom he daily meets on his way to the office. Paperback.
One hundred twenty years before the historic trek by Lewis and Clark, another band explored the central waterway of North America on an adventure more harrowing and deadly than later explorers could ever boast. Sponsored by the French, not the British, this journey is often omitted in writing of American history, but its impact on the development of the Mississippi River Valley is critical. Paperback.
In a West German manor house, Robert Trepnitz Kirkman holds in his hand a long-lost secret—a letter, a photograph, and his father’s account of an incident in the Argonne forest during WWI. He anxiously waits for the opportunity to reveal his secret to the schloss’s baroness. But intrigue runs thick through the walls of this cold grey house when he discovers she knows of the letter, the photograph, and much more.
Upon inspection, a life can be said to be a composite of mere when, where, why, how, and what. The fictitious character John March was born in the mid-nineteenth century in the formerly Confederate South. He is an inheritor of land and money, expected to become the quintessential “Southern gentleman.” But into every life, some rain must fall, and John March, Southerner is no exception. Paperback.
“Dummy” is big. He is black. He doesn’t speak. To everybody in Linville, Mississippi, he’s a familiar sight, pulling his wagonload of laundry for his mother. What people remember most about him and his family is the way his father died after being accused of bothering a white woman, and Jubal’s own act of violence while working the levee after the flood of 1927. Hardcover.
Set in sultry New Orleans during the Civil War, this novel tells the story of a certain Confederate army artillery unit. It provides an account of the experiences of Hilary Kincaid’s Battery, or “the ladies’ men,” as they are more playfully called, and gives insight into the nature of war, hope, and peace. Paperback.
Set in post-Civil War North Carolina, this well-written novel by famed author Thomas Dixon, Jr., tells of the pain of surrender and the struggle to rebuild and recreate a new identity for the South. It exposes the reality of social and race relations during the time of Reconstruction. Paperback.
Set in the mysterious French Quarter of New Orleans during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Madame Delphine is filled with Creole allure. It tells the story of an old quadroon woman, whose life and home have spiraled downward from their prior state of grandeur. Paperback.
Mr. Roosevelt’s Steamboat is an authoritative account of a twenty-five-hundred-mile voyage that significantly contributed to the United States’ transportation revolution. The dynamic main characters share tender romance and great courage. Their incredible trip down the Mississippi assured the future of steam navigation and the progress of the great westward movement. Paperback.
Many scholars believe that The Neutral French: The Exiles of Nova Scotia, published in 1841, inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to write his famous poem Evangeline, which was published six years later. Paperback.
Based upon the family history of John Walworth and author Louise Wilbourn Collier, Pilgrimage: A Tale of Old Natchez is the bittersweet saga of the family’s struggle to survive the devastation of War and—even more difficult—the subsequent cultural and social changes that followed. Tracing the years from 1830 to 1930, this is a generational tale that relates not only the effect the Civil War had upon this family but also upon the historic town of Natchez and its surroundings.