The lower Mississippi River winds past the city of New Orleans between enormous levees and a rim of sand, mud, and trees called “the batture.” On this remote and ignored piece of land thrives a humanity unique to the region—ramblers, artists, drinkers, fishers, rabbit hunters, dog walkers, sunset watchers, and refugees from immigration, alimony, and other aspects of modern life. Author Oliver A. Houck has frequented this place for the past twenty-five years. Down on the Batture describes a life, pastoral, at times marginal, but remarkably fecund and surprising. From this place he meditates on Louisiana, the state of the waterway, and its larger environs. He describes all the actors who have played lead roles on the edge of the mightiest river of the continent, and includes in his narrative plantations, pollution, murder, land grabs, keelboat brawlers, slave rebellions, the Corps of Engineers, and the oil industry. Houck draws from his experience in New Orleans since the early 1970s in the practice and teaching of law. He has been a player in many of the issues he describes, although he does not undertake to argue them here. Instead, story by story, he uses the batture to explore the forces that have shaped and spell out the future of the region. The picture emerges of a place that—for all its tangle of undergrowth, drifting humanity, shifting dimensions in the rise and fall of floodwater—provides respite and sanctuary for values that are original to America and ever at risk from the homogenizing forces of civilization.

The lower Mississippi River winds past the city of New Orleans between enormous levees and a rim of sand, mud, and trees called “the batture.” On this remote and ignored piece of land thrives a humanity unique to the region—ramblers, artists, drinkers, fishers, rabbit hunters, dog walkers, sunset watchers, and refugees from immigration, alimony, and other aspects of modern life. Author Oliver A. Houck has frequented this place for the past twenty-five years. Down on the Batture describes a life, pastoral, at times marginal, but remarkably fecund and surprising. From this place he meditates on Louisiana, the state of the waterway, and its larger environs. He describes all the actors who have played lead roles on the edge of the mightiest river of the continent, and includes in his narrative plantations, pollution, murder, land grabs, keelboat brawlers, slave rebellions, the Corps of Engineers, and the oil industry. Houck draws from his experience in New Orleans since the early 1970s in the practice and teaching of law. He has been a player in many of the issues he describes, although he does not undertake to argue them here. Instead, story by story, he uses the batture to explore the forces that have shaped and spell out the future of the region. The picture emerges of a place that—for all its tangle of undergrowth, drifting humanity, shifting dimensions in the rise and fall of floodwater—provides respite and sanctuary for values that are original to America and ever at risk from the homogenizing forces of civilization.

They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shantyboats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches. Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana’s most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching. Today Fry is among the senior generation of “River Rats” living in a vestigial colony of twelve “camps” on New Orleans’s river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.

This engaging environmental history explores the rise, fall, and rebirth of one of the nation's most important urban public landscapes, and more significantly, the role public spaces play in shaping people's relationships with the natural world. Ari Kelman focuses on the battles fought over New Orleans's waterfront, examining the link between a river and its city and tracking the conflict between public and private control of the river. He describes the impact of floods, disease, and changing technologies on New Orleans's interactions with the Mississippi. Considering how the city grew distant—culturally and spatially—from the river, this book argues that urban areas provide a rich source for understanding people's connections with nature, and in turn, nature's impact on human history.

There's just nowhere else but South Louisiana to find real knee-slapping, crowd-hooting Zydeco music. Even the big-city chefs can't cook up a Cajun meal the way they do at the roadside restaurants deep in the bayous of Acadiana. Likewise, no other guide matches the amount of in-depth information presented in Cajun Country Guide. It's a study of Cajuns that tells visitors how to find the sights, sounds, and flavors of one of America's most culturally unique regions. Take a vacation to a part of our own country that, in some places, didn't even speak English until nearly fifty years ago. While modern technology is weeding out some of the one-of-a-kind qualities of this subculture, not all of them are gone, or even hard to find, if you know how to hunt for them. And there are no better hunters than authors Macon Fry and Julie Posner. With the handy maps, reviews, and recommendations packed into the Cajun Country Guide, a trip to the bayous won't leave one feeling like a visitor, but more like a native who has come back home.

The life and works of William Faulkner have generated numerous biographical studies exploring how Faulkner understood southern history, race, his relationship to art, and his place in the canons of American and world literature. However, some details on Faulkner’s life collected by his early biographers never made it into published form or, when they did, appeared in marginalized stories and cryptic references. The biographical record of William Faulkner’s life has yet to come to terms with the life-long friendships he maintained with gay men, the extent to which he immersed himself into gay communities in Greenwich Village and New Orleans, and how profoundly this part of his life influenced his “apocryphal” creation of Yoknapatawpha County. Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond explores the intimate friendships Faulkner maintained with gay men, among them Ben Wasson, William Spratling, and Hubert Creekmore, and places his fiction into established canons of LGBTQ literature, including World War I literature and representations of homosexuality from the Cold War. The book offers a full consideration of his relationship to gay history and identity in the twentieth century, giving rise to a new understanding of this most important of American authors.

Few thoroughfares offer as rich a history as Louisiana's River Road between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. In this third edition of her extremely popular guide, Along the River Road, Mary Ann Sternberg provides a revised introduction, new images, and updated information on sites and attractions as well as tales and local lore about favorite and overlooked destinations. Featuring background information about the area and a detailed guided tour -- upriver on the east bank and downriver along the west -- the book gives an overview of the River Road, serving as an accessible and definitive companion to exploring the corridor. Sternberg's abiding appreciation of the area's allure, garnered over twenty years, produces a must-have travel companion to a place that far exceeds its common reputation as only a parade of elegant antebellum mansions. In this new edition, she again encourages travelers to experience the many treasures of this wondrous byway for themselves, so they too can see how much it has changed over the past decade.