The Double Dealers in Bohemian New Orleans

This chapter chronicles New Orleans as the first Southern city widely associated with bohemianism, where the Creole heritage and the French Quarter provided one of the likeliest stand-ins for the original homeland of bohemia--the Parisian Latin Quarter--in the nation. Bohemianism flourished in the New Orleans of the 1920s, taking root in a series of local institutions, including the modernist literary journal the Double Dealer. The journal carefully navigated bohemian-bourgeois tension, the modern and the traditional, the conservative and the progressive. Featuring such writers as Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, the New Orleans bohemia that existed on and off the pages of the Double Dealer provided a liminal territory, alternately challenging and reinforcing dominant ideologies and mediating a series of social and cultural divides. The lively, engaging, and frustrating "talk, talk, talk" (in Faulkner's words) that circulated between Double Dealer publications and the extended dialogues featured in Faulkner's roman à clef, his apprentice novel Mosquitoes (1927), reveal the gendered, racial, socioeconomic, regional, national, and temporal fault lines at the base of this Southern bohemia.