A lushly illustrated celebration of two centuries of creative work from Louisiana

Many years ago, during a long, confining illness in her native Australia, Margaret Stones whiled away the hours drawing the wildflowers friends placed at her bedside. Today she is acclaimed as one of the world's most distinguished botanical artists. Stones served for twenty-five years as the principal illustrator for Curtis's Botanical Magazine, contributing more than 400 drawings. She has also completed a six-volume illustrated work, The Endemic Flora of Tasmania, and has worked under commission for the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, England, the Royal Horticultural Society of England, and similar institutions the world over.In 1976, as part of the United States' bicentennial celebration, Louisiana State University commissioned Stones to execute six watercolor renderings of Louisiana flora. This initial project was so successful that Stones was asked to draw a much larger number of the state's native plants. Today Stones has completed more than 200 watercolors, all of which are maintained in the LSU Libraries' E. A. McIlhenny Natural History Collection. The drawings represent not only a collection of exquisite botanical art but an accurate scientific record of Louisiana's lush, varied, and beautiful flora.Flora of Louisiana reproduces the great bulk of Stones's collection. The volume contains more than 200 pages of full-color and black-and-white illustrations. Each drawing is accompanied by a short text that gives information about the plant, including a physical description and details about habitat and growing conditions.The publications of Flora of Louisiana is set to coincide with the first of several international exhibitions of Stones's drawings, beginning in April, 1991.

Contemporary artists revealing the state's urban landscapes, southwestern swamps, central prairies, verdant forests, and northern fields

A lively report of travels in early nineteenth-century Texas and Louisiana and a fascinating account of the discovery, exploration, and settlement of those areas is presented in the work of this ebullient young French dramatist and journalist who traveled to Louisiana in 1837 and to Texas in 1839. Frédéric Gaillardet, an alert and talented writer of the romantic school, was lured away for a decade from a successful career in Paris to satisfy his wanderlust and to seek inspiration on the American frontier. During that time he visited the American Southwest, and he talked with many personages there—men like Sam Houston, Mirabeau B. Lamar, and Achille Murat. His character sketches of these men add zest to the book, as do the facets of Gaillardet's own personality and life displayed in these pages. Gaillardet's reports of his travels were published in various French-language newspapers of the time; a few were incorporated into the author's posthumous memoirs. His opinions, as recorded in his writings, exerted undeniable influence in the French decision to recognize Texas; one of his theses was that the Republic of Texas might become a curb, rather than a stepping stone, to an expanding United States. Despite Gaillardet's historical importance, however, none of these chapters has ever appeared before in English translation. This collection was gathered from several sources: the Journal des Débats, the Constitutionnel, the Courrier des États-Unis, and Gaillardet's memoirs, entitled L'Aristocratie en Amérique. The latter chapters concentrate on the career of a prominent Louisiana lawyer, politician, and diplomat, Pierre Soulé, whose much maligned name Gaillardet repeatedly and stoutly defended. A less favorable treatment of Soulé, contained in Fanny Calderón de la Barca's Attaché in Madrid, is reprinted in the appendix to aid the reader in judging the accuracy of Gaillardet's analysis of this arresting figure. Copious footnotes to clarify the text have been added by the translator. His introduction presents a biographical sketch of Gaillardet, together with a careful analysis of the book, which has been translated lucidly and vividly.

In 1925 William Faulkner began his professional writing career in earnest while living in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He had published a volume of poetry (The Marble Faun), had written a few book reviews, and had contributed sketches to the University of Mississippi student newspaper. He had served a stint in the Royal Canadian Air Corps and while working in a New Haven bookstore had become acquainted with the wife of the writer Sherwood Anderson. In his first six months in New Orleans, where the Andersons were living, Faulkner made his initial foray into serious fiction writing. Here in one volume are the pieces he wrote while in the French Quarter. These were published locally in the Times-Picayune and in the Double Dealer. The pieces in New Orleans Sketches broadcast seeds that would take root in later works. In their themes and motifs these sketches and stories foreshadow the intense personal vision and style that would characterize Faulkner's mature fiction. As his sketches take on parallels with Christian liturgy and as they portray such characters as an idiot boy similar to Benjy Compson, they reveal evidence of his early literary sophistication. In praise of New Orleans Sketches, Alfred Kazin wrote in the New York Times Book Review that "the interesting thing for us now, who can see in this book the outline of the writer Faulkner was to become, is that before he had published his first novel he had already determined certain main themes in his work." In his trailblazing introduction, Carvel Collins often called "Faulkner's best-informed critic," illuminates the period when the sketches were written as the time that Faulkner was making the transition from poet to novelist. "For the reader of Faulkner," Paul Engle wrote in the Chicago Tribune, "the book is indispensable. Its brilliant introduction . . . is full both of helpful information . . . and of fine insights." "We gain something more than a glimpse of the mind of a young genius asserting his power against a partially indifferent environment," states the Book Exchange (London). "The long introduction . . . must rank as a major literary contribution to our knowledge of an outstanding writer: perhaps the greatest of our times."