Stories of creative types who come to New Orleans to transform, melt down, or disappear are a dime a dozen, but few embody the New Orleans writer archetype quite so well as Sherwood Anderson. This Midwestern son is the quintessential New Orleans transplant. Before New Orleans, he was a National Guardsman, an ad man, a paint salesman, and a happily married father. Then came, in the parlance of their time, the crack-up.

One day he simply wandered away from his place of business on foot and walked all the way from Elyria, OH, to Cleveland. Then Anderson divorced wife number one, took up with a sculptor named Tennessee Mitchell (wife number two), and moved to Chicago where his writing took off. He got a book deal and won a Dial magazine award, which would put him in the same company as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound a few years later when they caught up to him.

Wanderlust returned in time, and this time Anderson took more efficient transportation. After stints living in New York and Nevada, Anderson found his way to New Orleans in 1922, where he fell face first into the Carnival season. The KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana quotes Double Dealer magazine editor Julius Friend on his first impressions of Anderson:

“He was an exotic spectacle! His long hair fell in strands over his florid face. His apparel: a rough tweed suit with leather buttons, a loud tie on which was strung a large paste finger ring, red socks with yellow bands, a velour hat with a red feather stuck in it. He carried a heavy blackthorn stick.”

Anderson was almost certainly the sort who wore beads after Mardi Gras day.

In 1924, Anderson came back to New Orleans to stay and set up shop with wife number three in the Upper Pontalba apartment building on Jackson Square. He ditched the new wife soon after.

The Upper Pontalba Building. Sherwood Anderson held
court at 504-B (second wreath from the left).

Even though Sherwood Anderson’s name is mentioned in the same breath as T.S. Eliot, Carl Sandburg, and William Faulkner, it’s still hard to find someone outside a university English department who knows his work today. Some will remember flipping past part of his Winesburg, Ohio, in a college literature class. A few might have read it. While those other names are more famous for fanning the flames of American modernism, it was usually Sherwood Anderson who lit the match.

From his Pontalba perch, Anderson penned, “New Orleans, The Double Dealer, and the Modern Movement in America” for the literary magazine named in its title. The Double Dealer was itself a counter strike to H.L. Mencken’s claims that there was nothing in the South worth reading or writing home about. Anderson’s already established status gave weight to this salvo across the literary Mason Dixon divide. It drew to his side the young men and women whose names eclipse his own today and who would ultimately come to define the “Modern Movement” Anderson wrote about.

Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner were two of the unknowns who came to New Orleans to practice alongside Anderson, but the son must kill the father. Soon enough, turning on Sherwood Anderson in print became a popular modernist sport. Hemingway savaged Anderson in Torrents of Spring, an unmistakable parody of Anderson’s work. Faulkner and William Spratling mocked Anderson and many others in Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles, an illustrated catalog of the characters populating the French Quarter. One strike wasn’t enough for Faulkner. He took another swing at Anderson in his novel Mosquitoes, which was based on a disastrous Lake Pontchartrain pleasure cruise hosted by Anderson. Anderson took it all in stride, but anything resembling a cordial relationship between him and the young men was over.

Eventually they all left New Orleans for whatever life brought next. Despite the new lease on life he found here, Anderson married a young labor activist (wife number four) and left the bayou for the mountains of southwestern Virginia where he finally stayed married and lived in relative peace for the rest of his life. The wheels of the literary movement they started kept turning. A bookstore now operates in the house where Faulkner lived, and it sells the books he wrote there.

SEE

Sherwood Anderson’s Upper Pontalba apartment
(540-B St. Peter Street)
The Upper and Lower Pontalba buildings line two sides of Jackson Square and run perpendicular to the face of St. Louis Cathedral. The “Upper Pontalba” is upriver. That’s “south” to out-of-towners or the side nearer to Canal Street. Everyone who was anyone in literary circles probably graced this doorway to attend one of Anderson’s parties. Note the “Literary Landmark” commemorative plaque placed next to his door by the Friends of Libraries USA and the Friends of the New Orleans Public Library.

Anderson’s apartment is now a Literary Landmark.

The Double Dealer office locations
(201 Common Street and 203 Baronne Street)
As mentioned earlier, The Double Dealer was founded to prove H.L. Mencken wrong about Southern literary merit, and it’s arguable that they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. In The Double Dealer’s four short years of publication, they gave an early voice to the giants of today’s American literary canon. The journal laid down a foundation for American letters that we are still building upon today, and it began at these locations.

Faulkner House Books
(624 Pirate’s Alley, http://faulknerhousebooks.com)
In an apartment here not far from his mentor Anderson’s, Faulkner wrote many of the poems and sketches that gave him his start and, ultimately, his first novel, Soldier’s Pay. William Spratling, Faulkner’s partner in crime on Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles, was his roommate here. Today the building houses Faulkner House Books, which sells plenty of its namesake’s work as well as more recent literature. The building faces Pirate’s Alley, where Andrew Jackson is traditionally believed to have met with Jean Lafitte before the Battle of New Orleans, and the beautiful St. Anthony Garden behind St. Louis Cathedral.

The “Faulkner House” in Pirate’s Alley is within stumbling distance of Anderson’s apartment and is where young William Faulkner wrote his novel Soldier’s Pay. It’s now the home of Faulkner House Books.

Hotel Monteleone
(204 Royal Street, http://hotelmonteleone.com/)
There is no talking about literary New Orleans without mentioning the Hotel Monteleone. This hotel is another Literary Landmark because it is practically the sun around which the literary bodies of New Orleans orbit. Today it hosts the annual Tennessee Williams Festival plus a few other literary festivals throughout the year, but its claim to fame goes way back. Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Tennessee Williams have all slept a few nights under its roof.

The Monteleone’s most notorious temporary resident, however, was a Mr. Truman Capote, who claimed to have been born in the hotel. It’s not quite true. His parents were living in the Monteleone when he was born, but Capote’s birth happened across town at Touro Infirmary. Capote spent his fair share of time in the hotel, though, and he lived just down the street at 711 Royal Street when he wrote Other Voices, Other Rooms.

Fun fact: the Monteleone’s Carousel Bar really spins, although very, very slowly. Once you’ve had a few drinks, though, navigating your way down from the bar stool could be a challenge, so be careful out there.

Article originally appeared in Anachronistic Tendencies Vol. 1: New Orleans.