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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Louisiana History > Item 182
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Strange True Stories of Louisiana
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by George Washington Cable
Sales Rank: 724070
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List Price: $7.99
$7.99
At Amazon
on 6-19-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 368 pages
Published by: Pelican Publishing Company; 1st Pelican ed edition February 1994
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 1565540387
ISBN 13 Number: 978-1565540385
Book Dimensions:
6.9 x 4.2 x 0.8 inches
Weighs: 9.9 ounces
Book Description
At the turn of the century, people outside of New Orleans viewed the city through the eyes of journalist and author George W. Cable. His writings portrayed a tropical European city nestled on the banks of an American river still teeming with the literary, artistic, and social developments of a late Renaissance. In his own romance with Louisiana, Cable came upon many stories written by its denizens. While Cable assisted some authors in finding places to publish their works, there were many stories he kept for himself. Much of this collection can now be found in "Strange True Stories of Louisiana."
"They are mine by right of discovery," writes Cable. "From various necessities of the case I am sometimes the story-teller, and sometimes, in the readers interest, have to abridge; but I add no fact and trim naught of value away. Here are no unconfessed ‘restorations, not one. In time, place, circumstance, in every essential feature, I give them as I got them--strange stories that truly happened, all partly, some wholly, in Louisiana."
"Strange True Stories of Louisiana" is Cables compilation of seven unusual, factual accounts of life and history in the area. They include tales of two French sisters who made the dangerous trek to the unsettled lands of North Louisiana at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Focusing on New Orleans, Cable adds the story of "The ‘Haunted House in Royal Street," which spurs the imaginations of ghost hunters more than a century after its original writing. There is also a diary account, in its first published form, of a Union lady trapped behind the battle lines during the Civil War.
About The Author
Southern reformist George W. Cable (1844-1925) was the first fiction writer in the South to outwardly challenge the accepted literary tradition of the old South and its aristocracy. In his writings, he faithfully campaigned directly through his essays and indirectly through his stories and novels to reform the racial caste system and eradicate political corruption. Mr. Cable also touched on many other realities of the time including violence, racial intermarriage, and the vanishing of Creole culture. Through his pioneering use of dialect and his skill with the short-story form, Mr. Cable helped lead the Local Color movement of the late 1800s.
Mr. Cable was born and raised in New Orleans. He dropped out of school at fifteen, when his father died and he was forced to help support his family as a clerk. At the age of nineteen, he volunteered in the Confederate service, joining the Fourth Mississippi Cavalry. Two years later, he returned home where he worked as a columnist and reporter for the New Orleans Picayune under the pen name "Drop Shot."
In 1872, Mr. Cable was given access to the citys archives at the Cabildo and the St. Louis Cathedral so he could do research on a series of articles. While in these archives, he discovered documents he began to turn into short stories, dramatizing New Orleans records of elaborate cultural and racial diversity since 1718. His publication in 1879 of Old Creole Days, a collection of seven short stories, established the genre of southern local-color fiction. Cable has been called the most important Southern artist working in the late nineteenth century, as well as the first modern Southern writer.
Reader Reviews
As we traveled along Interstate ten between New Orleans and "Red Baton," I mused about the girders which held the highway up out of the bayous. What must travel or life in general have been like in that part of Louisianna a century or so ago. George Washington Cable first collected these seven stories about Louisianna and published them in 1888. He calls them true stories. They are stories from times before his own from 1782 to after the Civil War. At the same time these stories are strange to Cable because life had changed so much in Louisianna between the time that the stories occurred and his own time. The stories start with the story of Louise who came to Louisianna and almost became the dinner of a local chief. This tragic tale is quickly followed by the "bright and happy" story of Francoise and Suzanne who travel through the "wilds" of Atchafalaya. Alix's story is next. She was once introduced to Marie Antoinette. Then the French Revolution came and Alix lost her first husband. She will be a character that I long admire but I ask you to read the story to see why. Salome Muller was a German who lost most of her family enroute to Louisianna. (Some 1200 of the 1800 who attempted to make that trip never arrived.) Salome became a slave. Yet some twenty years or so later her family took her case to the State Supreme Court to free her. The "haunted house" is the house of Madame Lalaurie who chose to save her possessions rather than her slaves when a fire burned her house. The story of Attalie Brouillard reminds me of the con men of the movie "The Sting" with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. The last story is a diary of a Union woman who lived in the South during the Civil War. To these I would like to add the story of George W Cable who begins his book by telling his readers how he got these other seven stories. These are true stories from people who lived in Creole Louisianna, a time strange to us now.
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Strange True Stories of Louisiana
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