Proof of Life

People cannot imagine New Orleans not rising up from the dead because so many authors breathed life into the city over the decades. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

The city always drew authors of unquestioned talent and questionable backgrounds. In the late 1890s, a former bank teller named William Sidney Porter was accused of embezzlement in Austin. He ran to New Orleans, wrote some short stories and signed them "O. Henry." The quality of his writing didn't prevent him from eventually being arrested and convicted. Truman Capote and Lillian Hellman were born there. John Howard Griffin set parts of Black Like Me there. New Orleans and its surrounding area has been part and parcel of American letters. Mark Twain wrote extensively about the city in Life on the Mississippi. Longfellow's epic Evangeline was partially set amid the bayous. Walt Whitman worked in New Orleans for a while as a journalist. The city's influence isn't limited to relatively ancient literary history. Every book by Walker Percy seems to drip etouffee. Anne Rice's creepy vampire novels fit New Orleans' traditional spookiness like fangs in an exposed, willing neck. There was, until Katrina's nonfiction terrors, an Anne Rice Walking Tour that led fans by various places where she'd lived and worked.