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Gary Krist has written for the New York Times, Esquire, Salon, the Washington Post Book World, and elsewhere. He is the author of the bestselling City of Scoundrels and the acclaimed The White Cascade, as well as several works of fiction. He has been the recipient of the Stephen Crane Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lowell Thomas Gold Medal for Travel Journalism, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Q. What drew you to New Orleans as your subject?
A. I love the fact that New Orleans was the first major American metropolis to build an opera house but the last to build a sewer system. The city really was (and is) an original, arising from a confluence of ethnicities and traditions unlike that of any other city in the country. As a result, it developed a unique urban culture - not quite foreign, but not quite American either - that was particularly fascinating to me. Certainly the indulgent, cosmopolitan ethos of New Orleans was entirely different from the culture of the last place I wrote about - Chicago, a frenetic industrial giant representing the epitome of no-nonsense businesslike practicality. So that contrast is one of the things that drew me to New Orleans this time around - I wanted to see how the social, racial, and moral issues of the times played out in these two very different urban settings.
Q. New Orleans has a long and storied history. Why did you choose to home in on this particular thirty-year period of the early twentieth century?
A. I've made the Progressive Era something of a personal specialty in my recent books, mainly because I see it as a crucial age of transition, marking the beginning of ...
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