From Gen. Andrew Jackson to Marie Laveau to Paul Tulane, colorful legends of the early Crescent City convey a fascinating landscape. Author Andre Cajun’s lively characters and locations etch an animated past relayed with artistic freedom. He imparts sensationalized circumstances that the modern reader will recognize as a typical style of today’s media.
Cajun moved to New Orleans as a riverboat captain but soon found a more suitable career as an entertainer, delighting the crowds of visitors awaiting transport on the Mississippi with his historical parodies of Louisiana’s rich traditions. Those embellished tales fill the pages of this vintage book. Predominantly fiction with just enough actual history to make them believable, these vignettes cover everything from a tongue-in-cheek exposé of the Quadroon Ballroom to the notorious Basin Street to assertions of Napoleon’s remains hidden, along with pirate booty, deep in the bayous of Barataria.
This new edition is faithfully recreated from the 1951 version, with the addition of an informative foreword by John T. Magill. Cajun’s unabashed exuberance for all things piratical and his taste for embellishment are celebrated much as they have been since this collection was originally released in 1941. Magill’s foreword provides illuminating historical context documenting Cajun’s societal biases along with his skewed sense of history—all of which make for an enjoyable read.
About the Author
Andre Cajun, born Andrew Jackson Navard in Lake Charles in 1893, published several tourist booklets that he hawked, along with his entertaining stories, as a lecturer on the steamer The President, docked at the foot of Canal Street. He died in 1957.
About the Foreword Writer
John T. Magill is an esteemed curator/historian for the prestigious The Historic New Orleans Collection. He has contributed numerous articles to New Orleans Magazine and Louisiana Cultural Vistas magazine. Magill is also the co-author of Pelican’s Canal Street: New Orleans’ Great Wide Way and Christmas in New Orleans.
STORIES OF NEW ORLEANS
By Andre Cajun
Foreword by John T. Magill
FICTION / Historical
HISTORY / United States / State & Local / General
96 pp. 5 1/2 x 7 3/4
8 b/w illus. 1 b/w photo 5th ed.
ISBN: 978455617784
E-book ISBN: 9781455617791