A Trip to Boggy Creek in Texarkana, Arkansas

A friend of mine named Hal I went to high school with is a lawyer in Shreveport, Louisiana, and he and I and his little brother and one other guy wanted to see what the real Boggy Creek was in Arkansas, infamous from the film “Legend of Boggy Creek” and “Return to Boggy Creek.” Twenty years ago we were all in Shreveport at the time so it wouldn’t be that far of a trip into Arkansas to see it. We took a van there and I worked nights as a computer operator down in Baton Rouge so I was on a different time schedule at the time, just up there for a visit. There apparently really was a Boggy Creek there, as a sort of apocryphal legend. We were not sure if we would see a southern Bigfoot but the creek was really there. We drove up there and got to Texarkana, Arkansas.

It also happened to be near the birthplace of famed Ragtime composer Scott Joplin (1867-1917). My friend Hal and I both played a lot of piano(I grew up playing ragtime myself and ended up going to music school in Piano Performance) and we wanted to see any mention of Joplin, any historical markers that might be in town. We found a large mural painted in the middle of town against a building commemorating Scott Joplin. We went around the corner and there was an old wooden building and there was an historical marker there stating that that place was the Elementary school of Scott Joplin.

Now that that was complete, we all drove onward. I mentioned to the guys that in both movies that Boggy Creek was a very large river. One of us said that he heard that the legend of this monster was to scare locals and was really believed in certain locales of Arkansas gentry. We drove to a small store to get something to eat, and we all bought chips, candy bars, drinks. Everything we bought there was rotted and fetid. I kept wondering why the store owners seemed so excited that we were buying their stuff.

Then we get to a certain point in the highway. There is a sign that says “Boggy Creek.” We parked the van. We got out. It was a veritable trickle of a creek. You could literally jump over this creek with one hop. Maybe we had gotten so far north that we had gotten towards the source of the creek. There was no sighting of the monster either.

In Louisiana heading into Mississippi there is a swamp called Honey Island. They have a legend there about an actual boggy creek type monster. There is a Honey Island Swamp Tour that has been going on for years. There is also a Loup Garou Legend, a sort of werewolf. There was a great episode of that with Darrin McGavin in the Night Stalker. Other than that, Louisiana does not have any other legends of monstrocity except for racketeering governors.

Speaking of local filmings, I often wonder that when they filmed the first silent Tarzan movie in Abbeville, Louisiana in 1918, in the swamp, whether Edgar Rice Burroughs actually travelled there during the filming. I have an old copy of the silent film. I have seen several photos of Burroughs on the sets of various movies. Abbeville is in the middle of nowhere, Louisiana. Down in the swamps 150 miles east of New Orleans, and far below Lafayette, Louisiana. Deep in Cajun country. A learned friend of mine said that a mummy movie was ‘set’ in a New Orleans swamp between Hammond, Louisiana and New Orleans, but wasn’t actually filmed there.

Burroughs was born in 1875, was in the US Cavalry when they were on horseback in the wild west, and later lived in Chicago and had a wife and new family, tried to make a living from everything from Vacuum Cleaner salesman (like Lovecraft who rewrote a vacuum cleaner manual but still was not hired by the company he sought a job at) to selling pencils at a little stall in the city. He failed at everything. Dozens of jobs. Then he read a pulp and thought he could do that. He wrote “Under the Moons of Mars” under the name “Norman Bean” and then Tarzan for the pulps, and the rest is history. I have a typed letter from him on Edgar Rice Burroughs stationary, written while he was staying in Hawaii and addressed to his daughter. A few months from the date of that letter he witnessed the Japanese planes as he was playing tennis, as they were flying over him on their way to Pearl Harbor. He was a war correspondent during WWII. He died in his sleep one night after reading a comic book.

Horror Gimmicks in Movies

When television burst upon the American scene in the late 1940s there was felt to be a need to give the public something that they could not get on television. Arch Oboler (b. 1907- d. 1987, pioneer of the "Inner Sanctum," "Lights Out" radio programs) was the first to devise a gimmick for his movie “Bwana Devil” known as 3D. Oboler was a radio pioneer who thought the 3D effect using polarized lenses and the showing of various objects being thrust at the viewer would revolutionize cinema. This did not work as well as planned because extended viewing caused headaches and blurry vision. After an initial mid-fifties boom 3D died out until the early 1980s when it enjoyed a brief revival. The two abominations "Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn" and "Spacehunters: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone" come to mind. Recently, I've sat like a good dad through "Spykids: 3D" and "The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl," but missed "Coraline" in the 3d version.

A master of the gimmick was the lowbudget filmmaker William Castle(born as William Schloss 1914- d. 1977). In “House on Haunted Hill” with Vincent Price, this movie used the gimmick “Emergo." This consisted of a plastic glow in the dark skeleton suspended on a theater wire which appeared to move into the audience at the climax of the movie. After an initial skeleton injured a Castle employee, a lighter skeleton was devised that did not work any better due to pranksters shooting it with BB guns. Castle was undaunted by this gimmick's failure and developed his most famous gimmick for the Vincent Price movie “The Tingler" was “Percepto,” which was an electrical shock device attached beneath the seats of moviegoers. During the climax the Tingler monster is supposed to invade the actual theater and to stimulate the monster effect, where the monster invaded the spinal column, thus “tingling" them to death unless they screamed. The theater owner pressed the percepto button, giving his audience an equivalent shock. William Castle even had a chair in his office wired with this gimmick. Most theatres could not afford this so they would have ushers use buzzers.

Other Castle innovations were the “fright break" where the audience would hear an announcement in the theatre nearing the end of the film that if they were too frightened they could leave the theatre and get a full refund and “Illusion-O,” which was a variation on 3D because each audience member could look through a blue or red tinted plastic to determine the outcome of the movie.

In Castle's “Macabre” a lesser gimmick not actually used in the course of the motion picture was the act of taking out ”fright insurance" on theatergoers although some suggested a “boredom insurance." being better for that film. Other Castle pictures such as “I Saw What You Did” contain no gimmicks. In "Mr. Sardonicus" audience members were given thumbs up or thumbs down voting device so they could decide whether Mr. Sardonicus could be cured and live or instead die. Of course the audience's actions had no difference in the outcome of the movie.

William Castle produced "Rosemary's Baby" and early in his career did second unit work on one of Hitchcock's earlier films.

A later 1950s film entitled “My World Dies Screaming” used a gimmick called “psychorama." It is the now banned use of subliminal editing into a movie. This movie edited such horrifying objects as skeleton pictures and the word “blood," and coffin pictures for periods of less than one second at different points in the movie. This gimmick did not work for this particular movie, although some theater owners used it successfully to raise concession sales. Laws were changed to prohibit this in the late '60s.

Another gimmick user was Ray Dennis Steckler (b. 1938 d. 2009). He created the gimmick of “Hallucinogenic Hypnovision" for his movie “Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed up Zombies.” This gimmick told audiences they would be actually surrounded by movie monsters, which ended up being theater ushers dressed up as movie monsters wielding cardboard knives when a spinning wheel appeared at various times in the movie. It was also used for a later movie entitled “The Maniacs are Loose.”

One of the most famous gimmicks used in movies was “Sensuround" originally used for “Earthquake” and later used for the theatrical release of the TV movie “Battlestar Gallactica.” This featured a device which shook the theater seats during the earthquake sequences. Theaters unable to afford this gimmick found they could achieve an equivalent effect by turning up the sound volume of the theaters to maximum volume. In later years the quality of stories was looked upon as being more important than the use of gimmicks and no major gimmicks have been used in recent years. But for students of cinema looking and examining these gimmicks over the years, these make for an interesting sidelight.

Lectures and Readings by Various Authors

H.P. Lovecraft went to see Percival Lowell lecture about the canals on mars, almost laughing all the way. He almost sounds like he would have been a heckler in the audience the way he describes how he disagreed with Lowell. Lowell had an observatory built in Arizona so that he could study those famous canals he believed existed on the Red Planet as first surmised by Schiaparelli.

Here is Lovecraft’s letter recounting his thoughts on the lecture:

“As to celebrities—one experience of mine had to do with an astronomical instead of a poetical giant; namely, Percival Lowell, the brother of Pres. Lowell of Harvard, and the widely known observer of Mars—whose observatory is in Flagstaff, Arizona. He lectured in this city in 1907, when I was writing for the Tribune, and Prof. Upton of Brown introduced me to him before the lecture in Sayles’ Hall. Now here is the amusing part—I never had, have not, and never will have the slightest belief in Lowell’s speculations; and when I met him I had just been attacking his theories in my astronomical articles with my characteristically merciless language. With the egotism of my 17 years, I feared that Lowell had read what I had written! I tried to be as noncommittal as possible in speaking, and fortunately discovered that the eminent observer was more disposed to ask me about my telescope, studies, etc., than to discuss Mars. Prof. Upton soon led him away to the platform, and I congratulated myself that a disaster had been averted!” (to Rheinhart Kleiner, 19 February 1916)

But Lovecraft was almost a fanboy when he came to hear Lord Dunsany speak. H. P. Lovecraft was greatly impressed by Dunsany after seeing him on a speaking tour of the United States, and Lovecraft's 'Dream-Cycle' stories clearly show his influence.

"There are my Poe pieces and my 'Dunsany' pieces - but alas - where are my Lovecraft pieces?" [Letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8, 1929, quoted in "Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos"]

Lovecraft also noted how tall Dunsany was.

Walker Percy, a Louisiana writer known for his novel "The Moviegoer," went to see W. Somerset Maugham speak even though he thought Maugham was a derivative author, I guess a sort of ‘pop’ writer. I wonder why he bothered to go see him lecture if he thought that of him.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sat in on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lectures and became fast friends with him and recorded on paper various acute responses from the audience. He called Emerson’s lecture on “Holiness” a “great bugbear” that the audience could barely understand and noted that Emerson was more a poet than a philosopher.

Charles Dickens readings were pretty successful. Dickens gave his first public readings in December 1853, in Birmingham, England.

A series of three for charity, they were rapturously received. "They lost nothing," he reported after a performance of the Carol, "misinterpreted nothing, followed everything closely, laughed and cried ... and animated me to the extent that I felt as if we were all bodily going up into the clouds together."

Dickens's warmth, histrionic flair and expressiveness evoked tears, applause, shrieks, laughter, hisses, and shouts of "Hear, hear!" from his audiences, who responded to the most memorable troopers of his great repertory company as if they were old acquaintances. It must have been quite a night at the theater. After attending the final evening in Boston during Dickens's second American tour, poet John Greenleaf Whittier marveled, "Another such star-shower is not to be expected in one's life-time."

Some young ladies at another reading asked for not only an autograph from him but a lock of Dickens' hair. I heard that when Wilkie Collins and Dickens would give readings when they toured together much later in their careers that there would be possible ‘hookups’ from the readings.

For Edgar Allan Poe he packed the house every time. (Among Poe’s later lectures were “The Poets and Poetry of America,” “The Poetic Principle” and “The Universe.”) He had many critics, some long after he was gone:

William Butler Yeats was occasionally critical of Poe and once called him "vulgar". Emerson dismissed "The Raven" by saying, "I see nothing in it” and derisively referred to Poe as "the jingle man." Aldous Huxley wrote that Poe's writing "falls into vulgarity" by being "too poetical" – the equivalent of wearing a diamond ring on every finger.

I believe D.H. Lawrence mentioned him much in an essay entitled “Vulgarity in Literature.” Poe used to go to the opium dens in the wharves around Richmond on occasion in his life probably to escape various criticisms of his day, perhaps.


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Asimov loved "Laverne and Shirley" and other Notable Facts

Some authors had unique taste in things that one might never guess would fit their persona. Or were in unique situations that are mostly unknown.

Isaac Asimov’s favorite show of all time was “Laverne and Shirley” as mentioned in his two volume autobiography "In Memory Yet Green." When Jack London was a war correspondent for the Russo-Japanese war he wrote a fan letter to a newspaper about what a fan he was of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.” Edgar Allan Poe considered himself athletic in his younger years. There was a sport of jumping as far as possible from standing still and he often competed against friends and cousins.

Lovecraft used to go to the Howard Johnson’s and would often eat all thirty one flavors of ice cream. Arturo Toscanini, considered one of the greatest conductors in history used to watch wrestling matches on television in the 1950's. Ed Wood wrote a script for “The Beverly Hillbillies” which was rejected with a single line "Not interested." George Gershwin used to do magazine advertisements for Feenamint Laxative gum. Jack Kerouac had a fondness for watching "The Beverly Hillbillies."

Famous psychologist William James gave only one student in his tenure as a Harvard professor permission to be exempt from a final exam, and she was named Gertrude Stein. Aldous Huxley, known for great scripts like "Pride and Prejudice" and "Jane Eyre" was asked to write a script for the “Mr. Magoo” television show. All the while he was writing it, the producers didn’t have the heart to tell Huxley (who was basically blind) that the premise of Mr. Magoo was that the cartoon character was blind. The script was never used. In 1952 Phil K. Dick was approached to write radio scripts for the "Captain Video" radio show.

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Jack London, Ambrose Bierce and Robert Louis Stevenson at the First and Last Chance Saloon in Oakland

David Mathew (from the UK and a former reviewer for sf mag Interzone) and I officially sold CREATURE FEATURE, an 84 K novel to a new small publisher, and contracts are going to be mailed to us by the end of this week.

I have written before about writers hitting the booze, and came across this famous Oakland bar where Jack London (London is seen in the above picture studying or writing there as a young man - I guess they didn't card youths then to see if underage), Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce, and Robert Louis Stevenson had a few brewskies at one time or another.

From the SITE:

"Opened in 1883 by Johnny Heinold as J.M. Heinold's Saloon, this Historic Landmark looked much then as she does today. She was built right here in 1880 from the timbers of an old whaling ship over the water in a dock area that even then was at the foot of Webster Street. For nearly three years, the building was used as a bunk house by the men working the nearby oyster beds. Then in 1883, Johnny's $100 purchase, with the aid of a ship's carpenter, was transformed into a saloon.
It is for good reason that this is known as Jack London's Rendezvous."

"As a schoolboy, Jack London (1876-1916) studied at these same tables we still use today. Later, he would return to his favorite table and write notes for The Sea Wolf and Call of the Wild. At age 17, he confided to John Heinold his ambition to go to the University of California and become a writer. Johnny lent London the money for tuition and, although he never got beyond his first year, it was while studying at this saloon and listening to the stories of shipmates and stevedores that he developed his thirst for adventure."

"The theme of men bravely facing danger appears throughout the best of his works. Indeed Johnny Heinold and The First and Last Chance Saloon are referenced seventeen times in London's novel John Barleycorn. Heinold's saloon was where he met Alexander McLean, known for such cruelty at sea that his boat was nicknamed The Hell Ship. At the time of its writing, McLean became a model for London's Wolf Larsen in The Sea Wolf."

"Jack London is not the only spirit that kept company in these walls. Robert Louis Stevenson spent time here while waiting for his ship to be outfitted for his final cruise to Samoa. Other notables to sit at this bar include Joaquin Miller, Robert Service, Charles E. Markham, Earle Gardner, Erskine Caldwell, Ambrose Bierce, and Rex Beach."

There is a musical venue bar in uptown New Orleans called The Maple Leaf which often has poetry slams. There was a dipsomaniac poet that basically resided there, homeless actually, named Everette Maddox (1945-1989). At the end he pined after a woman from Alabama and sought her out but to no avail. The last part of his life he wandered the streets and sometimes slept in the back of a parked dump truck. He ended up dying, perhaps of consumption due to alcohol.

King of the Bohemian movement poet George Sterling (1869-1926), longtime friend of Jack London and Lovecraft buddy Clark Ashton Smith and who was mentored by a much older Ambrose Bierce, carried a cyanide capsule with him wherever he went. He often frequented the Bohemian Club, a famous bar in San Francisco. Whenever people asked about it, he said, speaking of the hereafter: "A prison becomes a home, if you have the key." He took the cyanide pill one day in November of 1926 at the Bohemian Club and died.

Here is the long version of why Jack London quit college and started on his long career, starting with his birth:

"London's mother, Flora Wellman, a music teacher and spiritualist who claimed to channel the spirit of an Indian chief, became pregnant, presumably from her union with William Chaney, an astrologer she lived with in San Francisco. According to Flora Wellman's account as recorded in the San Francisco Chronicle of June 4, 1875, Chaney demanded that she have an abortion, and when she refused, he disclaimed responsibility for the child. In desperation, she shot herself. She was not seriously wounded, but she was temporarily deranged.

"In 1897, when he was 21 and a student at the University of California, Berkeley, Jack London searched for and read the newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt and the name of his biological father. He wrote to William Chaney, then living in Chicago. Chaney responded bizarrely, considering the nature of the exchange, that he could not be Jack's father because he was impotent; he casually asserted that Jack's mother had relations with other men and averred that she had slandered him when she said he insisted on an abortion. In fact, he concluded, he was more to be pitied than Jack.[6] London was devastated. In the months following his discovery of his father who disavowed him and what Chaney did to London's mother, he quit school at Berkeley and went to the Klondike."

In the near future please be on the lookout for what is my 12th novel, CREATURE FEATURE, cowritten with David Mathew:

A journalist and his son travel to the midwest and the small town of Templeton to start a new life. The television station that hires him as a newswriter also hires him to be the kooky midnight horror movie emcee. As they adjust to their new home they realize that the citizens of this town are basically neurotic if not downright crazy, and the schools there have the highest suicide rate in the country. There is a sinister rich old family, the Hawkins, who basically own and run the town. Jim is beginning to think they could be a supernatural force behind the crazed fear.


www.mfkorn.com

A Bizarre Silent Film made at Pathe' Studios in 1907

There is a brand new podcast of a short story by me, David Mathew (was reviewer for Interzone) called “The Red Spectre” on http://fearondemand.com/, edited by horror writer Sidney Williams. It is free to listen to and was inspired by a real silent film made in 1907 whose director to this day is Unknown. The film features a diabolical red/sepia-tinted, masked skeleton character who hops around a surreal set and pantomimes bizarrely. He madly makes chemical potions and concoctions and disappears on occasion only to reappear and makes others vanish in puffs of smoke as he gleefully looks on and continues to hop and jump around the hellish set.
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Here is the listing for this bizarre silent film at www.silentera.com:

[The Red Spectre]
AKA El Espectro Rojo in [?] Spain?; The Red Spectre in the USA
(1907) French
B&W : Short film
Directed by (unknown)
Cast: (unknown)
Compagnie Genérale des Établissements Pathé Frères Phonographes & Cinématographes production; distributed by Compagnie Genérale des Établissements Pathé Frères Phonographes & Cinématographes. / Standard 35mm spherical 1.37:1 format. Color-tinted by Pathécolor stenciling process. / Some scenes originally hand-tinted.
Trick film.

Survival Status: Print exists.

Keywords: Coffins - Devils - Fire
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Here is the IMDB database entry on the film. It states that they figured out who the directors really were.

Le Spectre Rouge (1907)

Segundo de Chomón (co-director)
Ferdinand Zecca (co-director)

Writer:
Segundo de Chomón (writer)
Release Date:
August 1907 (USA) more
Genre:
Short | Fantasy | Horror more
Plot:
A demonic magician attempts to perform his act in a strange grotto, but is confronted by a Good Spirit who opposes him. full summary | add synopsis
Plot Keywords:
Bottle | Skeleton | Cavern | Good Versus Evil | Devil
more
User Comments:
A fascinating, bizarre, and beautiful little film ____________________________________
In keeping with the History of New Orleans, before Hollywood as a movie factory came about, four cities were considered to be potential centers of filmmaking: New Orleans, Jacksonville Florida, a city somewhere in New Jersey, and of course, somewhere in California which turned out to be Hollywood. New Orleans failed as a possible center for this due to the weather factor: Lighting was critical and they realized that it rained a lot in New Orleans. The first film made in New Orleans was called "Mephisto and the Maiden".

MEPHISTO AND THE MAIDEN (1909/Selig Polyscope Co.) 15mins. BW. Silent. US.
A lustful friar trades his soul with Satan in exchange for two hours with a young woman.

The first silent Tarzan movie "Tarzan of the Apes" (1918) was filmed in the swamps of Abbeville, Louisiana in Vermilion Parish 150 miles west of New Orleans and below Lafayette. It starred Elmo Lincoln (born Otto Elmo Linkenhelt).

Speaking of Hollywood, Oscar Wilde went there in 1890 with the D'Oyly Dance Company when Hollywood was just a bunch of orange groves and before films were really ever made.

And now to change the subject entirely I thought I would submit this. Here are some little known "facts" about some Southern writers:

They say that when Truman Capote visited Willie Morris at Ole Miss that it was rumored that they practically dented every car while driving on campus and imbibing.

One day, William Faulkner was invited to take a drive (probably by his good friend Howard Hawks) with Clark Gable. Gable, trying to take a dig at Faulkner, asked him when he got in the car, “So, Mr. Faulkner, what do you do for a living?” to which Faulkner responded, “I am a writer. What do you do, Mr. Gable?”

When Faulkner lived in the French Quarter of New Orleans long ago, in a third floor apartment (not on the side street Pirate’s Alley where an old apartment of his is now a notable quaint bookstore), he and a lawyer friend of his used to imbibe spirits, and when that happens sometimes it can lead to rather dumb activity. One time they got a bb-gun and from Faulkner’s apartment window the future Nobel laureate and his drunk friend shot bb's at hapless and unfortunate older, genteel ladies on the backside as they innocently walked down the street in the French Quarter.

Consider checking out the Podcast of a short story by MF Korn and David Mathew, "The Red Spectre" at http://fearondemand.com/ .

www.mfkorn.com

A Brief History of Writers who came to New Orleans

I wanted to talk about writers and New Orleans but first I would like to mention that I am doing rewrites per a publisher of a novel tentatively titled CREATURE FEATURE, cowritten with David Mathew of Britain. The cover has not been chosen yet. In other news, four of my latest eight books are going out of print due to a publisher tanking. I made a few short story sales and am still waiting for a book of mine to be published in Germany that has been translated already.

New Orleans is preparing for Mardi Gras so I thought I would talk about writers in the French Quarter of N'awlins. If you ever wanted to know where Weird Tales writer and friend of H.P. Lovecraft lived, SF fantasy writer E. Hoffmann Price lived at 300 Royal Street. Some of his later Chinese Fantasy books are excellent. Lovecraft visited him in June of 1932. Here is the backstory:

Price's relationship with H. P. Lovecraft did not get off to an auspicious start; in a 1927 letter, Lovecraft remarked that his story "The Strange High House in the Mist" was, after "grave consultation with E. Hoffman Price", rejected by Weird Tales' Wright "as not sufficiently clear for the acute minds of his highly intelligent readers".

But when Lovecraft visited New Orleans in June 1932, Robert E. Howard telegraphed Price to alert him to the visitor's presence, and the two writers spent much of the following week together. The legend is not true that Price took Lovecraft to a New Orleans brothel, where he was amused to find that several of the employees there were fans of his work; the story, apocryphal or not, was first told about Seabury Quinn.

L. Sprague DeCamp mentioned the Seabury Quinn rumor in his biography of Lovecraft. During the New Orleans stay, Price and Lovecraft tried to get Robert E. Howard to show up but he couldn’t afford the trip from Texas. But Price eventually met the inventor of Conan the Barbarian when he took a trip to Texas in the 30's, the only pulp writer to actually meet Howard. In New Orleans the first night, Lovecraft sat up with Price for around nineteen hours and several pots of coffee for the longest conversation you could imagine. He had arrived there and called Price from his hotel, having just travelled through an "industrial Baton Rouge." He must have seen the Standard Oil Refinery here (now Exxon).

300 Royal Street eventually became a unique bookstore years later, a bookstore with no real name or sign out front. Sometimes there would be a proprietor there and sometimes there wouldn’t, actually. It was a nice musty place where you had to carefully walk through mazes of stacks to see some unearthed treasure of a tome. I remember when I went there once, they were selling mint condition Argosy’s from the early 1930’s for five dollars apiece. There were stacks of old newspapers, Life magazines, every possible book you could imagine with the dust of antiquity. The last time I went there it was shut down, empty. I am sure there is a new business there now.

Next to the St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter there is a small alley named “Pirates Alley.” A place in that alley is called the “Pirates Alley Bookstore.” It used to be a two story apartment of a young William Faulkner where he wrote “Soldiers Pay.” There are signed copies of books of his and Tennessee Williams and numerous others. Faulkner lived at another time on another street in New Orleans in a third floor apartment where years later on the street below, William Burroughs used to score his heroin and Lee Harvey Oswald handed out pamphlets on that corner. There are several apartments in the French Quarter where Tennessee Williams lived that have historical markers on them.

In Jackson Square near the Jax Brewery and the Cabildo and the Cathedral, on one side was an apartment where Sherwood Anderson lived and way on the other side lived Anita Loos, screenwriter friend of Aldous Huxley.

On Bourbon Street is The “Old Absinthe House” which no longer serves absinthe but the spigots are still there, and it has been around for over 200 years, since around 1806. There was a famed meeting there of pirate Jean Lafitte and Andrew Jackson on the second floor, planning the victory of the Battle of New Orleans. Outside this bar at 240 Bourbon Street is an historical marker naming a few celebrities that visited New Orleans: (many left out here): Mark Twain (he became a riverboat pilot here), Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, singer Jenny Lind, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Jack London, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, Enrico Caruso, Aldous Huxley, Walt Whitman (he was editor briefly of the New Orleans Crescent newspaper down here). Oscar Wilde visited here (I've also seen a picture of him in front of the Vicksburg, Mississippi Opera House). I've left out dozens of other writers that visited or stayed in New Orleans. Eugene O'Neill took a drunken rail trip down here. Charles Bukowski lived here for a while. Kerouac stayed at W.S. Burroughs house on the West Bank of the City as noted in "On the Road." Nelson Algren lived here and was a newspaper crime reporter on the graveyard shift; Walker Percy wrote "The Moviegoer" here. William Sydney Porter started writing as O. Henry after he came through here for a while to escape embezzlement charges in Texas. Scott Fitzgerald lived Uptown on now bohemian Prytania street in 1920. Malcolm Lowry and his wife Margerie were editing a late draft of “Under the Volcano” in a bar on St. Ann street and got thrown out for that instead of drinking and not editing.

The very fancy Monteleone Hotel is where Truman Capote stayed for a good while as a child and they say that is where he first got a sort of air of privilege. The large D.H. Holmes building on Canal Street had a clock on the front of it. This clock was the proverbial place in New Orleans for people to meet under, and was the setting in the beginning of “Confederacy of Dunces” where Ignatius Reilly agrees to meet his mother. John Kennedy Toole taught English at University of New Orleans for a while.

The literary history of New Orleans far surpasses this blog listing. If you go HERE on my webpage and scroll beyond the bio stuff you'll see a more complete list of writers of New Orleans and Louisiana in general. And if you go to the small link at the bottom of that list as noted you'll see an even more complete list of writers with their former addresses. You can take a Literary Walking Tour in the French Quarter which is a lot of fun. There is a Voodoo Tour, a Swamp Tour (down the road), a tour of Old Metairie Cemetery, and a Ghost Tour. There are a couple of neat Voodoo shoppes in the French Quarter as well. The French Quarter is a great place to visit. Lots of bars. Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano" opens with a description of Cuernevaca as having a certain number of bars and churches and golf courses. Sure there are lots of bars in New Orleans. But the restaurants are just as plentiful and some are the greatest in the world: Galatoires, Brennans. You can get a great oyster poboy, dressed, here. Mardi Gras is coming up very soon and everyone can swill as much liquor as possible before he/she gets ashes on his/her forehead.

www.mfkorn.com