New Orleans City Guide

By Works Progress Administration
Introduction by Lawrence N. Powell
Published by Garrett County Press
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

About The Book

The classic Federal Writers' Project guide to New Orleans history, folklore, and streets.

Written in 1938 under the direction of novelist and historian Lyle Saxon, this New Orleans guide was produced by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

A detailed portrait of the city, it gathers local history, folklore, photographs, and traditional recipes into a single volume.

Alongside the city's background and history, the guide covers Creole cuisine, Mardi Gras and Carnival, architecture, the cemeteries, and the customs of everyday New Orleans life. It also lays out walking tours of the neighborhoods, including the French Quarter, mapped street by street.

Many of the New Orleans sites and attractions the WPA writers documented in 1938 are still standing today, and the neighborhood tours remain remarkably accurate, making the guide both a record of the city's past and a companion for exploring it now.

Rather than a simple scan of the original pages, this edition has been completely reset in type, with the original photographs located and restored to their places. It also includes a contemporary essay by historian Lawrence N. Powell, placing the guide and its WPA origins in historical context.

About The Author

Works Progress Administration

The Federal Writers' Project was a New Deal program created in 1935, during the Great Depression, to put unemployed writers back to work. Its signature achievement was the American Guide Series, a sweeping set of travel guides documenting the history, culture, and character of the United States, region by region and city by city. Writers fanned out across the country to chronicle individual states, towns, and neighborhoods, capturing local life with a depth no commercial publisher had attempted. The New Orleans City Guide, first published in 1938, was among the series' standouts, a richly detailed portrait of the city's streets, customs, and culture.

Why We Love It

Because it captures New Orleans at street level, in the voices of writers who walked every block. The Federal Writers' Project sent people out to listen, and what they brought back was the real city: its kitchens and recipes, its Carnival, its cemeteries, the talk on the corner and the stories behind the buildings.

What gets us is how little has slipped away. Pick it up today and the walking tours still hold, the French Quarter still answers to Lyle Saxon's map, and the New Orleans of 1938 turns out to be a place you can still visit.

It is a guidebook, a folklore collection, and a time capsule at once, and this edition treats it with the care it deserves, reset in type with the original photographs found and restored.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Garrett County Press (August 15, 2011)
  • Length: 430 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781891053405

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New Orleans City Guide

By Works Progress Administration
Introduction by Lawrence N. Powell
Published by Garrett County Press
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
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