Narrator: The American novelist Sherwood Anderson once declared New Orleans "the most civilized spot in America" -- the one city in the country, he said, where there "[is] time for a play of the imagination over the facts of life."
During the 1920's, that recommendation lured aspiring writers from all over the country -- among them Hart Crane and Robert Penn Warren, Thornton Wilder, William Faulkner and Ezra Pound. By the end of the decade, New Orleans had become the literary capital of the American South.
Kenneth Holditch, Writer/Educator: Rent was cheap, food was very good and very inexpensive. Liquor was very inexpensive and readily available, even though it was illegal everywhere in the country. All of those elements I think combined, to create a place comfortable for the writer or the artist to be here and to be let alone.
Lawrence N. Powell, Historian: It's always been a special scene where you could... find some space... where you could expatriate without having to go to Paris, for example. And if you're marginal, if you know an exile from your own, own culture, this is a place I think where you can find some room to find ... to define who you are.
Narrator: Now, late on the night of December 26th, 1938, a bus from Memphis deposited another young writer on the dark, narrow streets of New Orleans.
Lugging a wind-up phonograph, a portable typewriter and a bound ledger he used as a journal, he made his way to a small hotel on St. Charles Avenue, and checked in for the night.
His name was Tom Williams -- and he'd come to New Orleans the way the persecuted seek asylum. After months of living in his parents' home in St. Louis, and under the gaze of his disapproving father, Williams finally had had enough -- and the morning after Christmas, he headed for New Orleans, "like a migratory bird," he later wrote, "going to a more congenial climate."
Less than forty-eight hours after he arrived, he confided to his journal: "Here surely is the place that I was made for if any place on this funny old world."
Rick Bragg, Writer: New Orleans offered homes to creative people and troubled people and people who didn't fit where they were so they came here to try to find some kind of acceptance and some kind of more than acceptance ... happiness, you know. You can find acceptance, but New Orleans gave you acceptance and happiness. It let you dance with people like you.
Narrator: Williams' first days in New Orleans were a revelation. He was mesmerized by the architecture, by the light, by the "rattletrap streetcars" as he called them -- one named Cemeteries, another Desire.
But it was in the Vieux Carré -- or old French Quarter -- that Williams found New Orleans its most alluring. "This is the most fascinating place I've ever been," he wrote his mother. "I walk continually, there is so much to see. ... The Quarter is really quainter than anything I have seen abroad, alive with antique and curio shops."
Abandoned by white Creoles in the years after the Civil War, the Quarter since had been home mainly to Italian immigrants and poor blacks. By the turn of the century, it had been widely considered a slum. Then, in the 1920's, the literary crowd had arrived -- and discovered in the neglect and decay a kind of romance, and a powerful source of inspiration. As Williams later put it, the French Quarter was "the last frontier of Bohemia. ... a place in love with life."
Rick Bragg, Writer: Williams found a home here. Life is more naked here. You hear smoke stacks and you hear streetcars, faith and ghosts and, death are all parts of this quilt here and its just, you know that's why writers can't resist it. It's just; it's never very far from you. Its hard to walk past life being lived here, you got to drop in on it.
John Scott, Artist: I think you go to a lot of cities, and people will dress up in the evening, to go to a cultural event. In New Orleans, you wake up in the morning, and you are in a cultural event.
Kenneth Holditch, Writer/Educator: You know, there's an old saying in New Orleans that the typical New Orleans meal is sitting around eating fine food, talking about what you had to eat yesterday and what you're going to eat tomorrow. And it's very tempting to just be constantly partying. And Williams was always fascinated by, by the people here and the sort of easygoing lifestyle.
Narrator: Williams quickly settled into a routine. In the mornings, he wrote -- seated at a rickety old desk in his rented third-floor garret on Toulouse Street. Afternoons were spent with other artists who called the Quarter home, parked at a sidewalk table at the Café du Monde or Napoleon House -- smoking cigarettes, debating politics, and watching the world go by. At night, he headed for the infamous stretch of Exchange Alley, where men gathered in dimly lit barrooms to meet other men.
Williams had had homosexual feelings before. But his upbringing had been so austere that he had not even recognized them for what they were. Now, for the first time, they could be openly acknowledged. "[The liberating effects of the city] gave me an inner security I didn't have before," he once said. "I was able to write better. I began to write with maturity."
Kenneth Holditch, Writer/Educator: He, he realized that he could live the lifestyle that he wanted to live, that he had been suppressing without being noticed very much. He said he found in New Orleans a freedom he had always needed and the shock of it against the Puritanism of his nature he said, gave him the material he'd be writing about for the rest of his life.
Narrator: About a month into his stay in New Orleans, Williams decided to enter a national drama contest, and submitted a collection of one-acts entitled American Blues. This piece he signed differently from all the others he had ever written -- not as "Tom Williams," but as Tennessee Williams. In New Orleans, he had found not only his voice, but himself.
Late in his life, Williams would insist that more than half of his best work had been written in New Orleans. The city would provide the setting for six of his short stories, five short plays, and three full-length dramas, including the iconic A Streetcar Named Desire.
Rick Bragg, Writer: His writer's eye caught the menace. Caught that glittering menace in New Orleans. He saw every speck of dirt. I think he saw every speck of broken glass. And I think he shook those things up, like he shook them up in a potion, and poured it out in his writing.
Narrator: "New Orleans and the moon have always seemed to me to have an understanding between them," Williams later wrote, "An intimacy of sisters grown old together, no longer needing more than a speechless look to communicate their feelings to each other... this lunar atmosphere of the city draws me back whenever ... a time of recession is called for... each time I have felt some rather profound psychic wound, a loss or a failure, I have returned to [New Orleans]. At such periods I would seem to belong there and no place else in the country."