Shirley Ann Grau's connections to New Orleans seem to be well established. She was born in the Crescent City in 1929, and she graduated from high school at Ursuline Academy. Her college years were spent at Sophie Newcomb, where she finished in 1950 and where she edited Carnival, the campus literary magazine in which her first stories appeared. Her early writing for Holiday magazine was about New Orleans society and included features on Mardi Gras and Galatoire's restaurant. She married James Feibleman, the chair of the philosophy department at Tulane, in 1955, and she and her family have continued to live part time in Metairie. Much of her best-known fiction is set in New Orleans, including The House on Coliseum Street (1961) and The Condor Passes (1971), as well as several excellent short stories in The Black Prince (1955), The Wind Shifting West (1973), and Nine Women (1986). Her most recent novel, Roadwalkers (1994), is set largely in New Orleans.¹

Thus Grau's ties to New Orleans are deep and abiding. Yet her life and work are not completely focused there. As all of her biographers note, she also lived as a child in Montgomery, Alabama, where her father had connections and where she studied classics at the Booth School. Most of her first stories collected in The Black Prince focus on African American characters in the rural South or on the Gulf Coast, outside New Orleans. Grau's best-known and most highly regarded novel, The Keepers of the House (1964), for which she won a Pulitzer Prize, is set in the rural South somewhere between New Orleans and Atlanta (both cities are mentioned in the story), and her first novel, The Hard Blue Sky (1958), is set on an island off the Louisiana coast. As her family has grown, she has divided her time between her home in Metairie and a summer home on Martha's Vineyard, a world where a number of her later stories in The Wind Shifting West and Nine Women are set. If a large part of Roadwalkers is set in New Orleans, an equally significant part is set elsewhere—in the rural South during the Depression, where homeless children wander alone, and in a boarding school for young women outside the South.

Naturally, perhaps, critical commentary on Grau has taken the importance of New Orleans in her work for granted. Paul Schlueter, the author of the Twayne book on Grau (1981), says in his essay in Fifty Southern Writers After 1900 that Grau is “a regional writer akin to Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Cather, not a writer who uses ‘Southern’ atmosphere, characters and settings for superficial local color narratives.” In the essay collection Louisiana Women Writers, Elzbieta Olesky focuses on The Keepers of the House, comparing it to Gone with the Wind. In probably the best single essay on Grau's work, “Shirley Ann Grau's Wise Fictions,” Linda Wagner-Martin surveys the broad thematic concerns of Grau's work in relation to the contexts of the book in which her essay appears—Southern Women Writers: The New Generation. She points out, quite rightly, a variety of ways in which Grau's work is defined by her understanding of women's lives, especially as these women relate to the “patriarchal matrix that seems to dominate Southern life.”² In addition, she suggests that Grau's consistent concern with nonwhite culture is set against patriarchal southern life as well.

Wagner-Martin's sense of profound contrasts in Grau's work is correct, and those contrasts seem to extend beyond the theme of women versus patriarchy. Certainly, the conflicts—between men and women, blacks and whites—are the place to start, but they can be expanded. For example, as Anthony Bukoski has noted, the presence of houses and homes in Grau's stories provides insight into her fiction, but those houses and the shelter they represent are defined against the wanderers, as in Roadwalkers, or in Grau's repeated motif of “a man outside,” where a vagrant or thief stands outside various houses and is seen by the people inside.³ Another noticeable contrast in Grau's work is between the rich and the poor. If her early work is concerned with primitive characters, as in The Black Prince and The Hard Blue Sky, then much of her later work in The Wind Shifting West and Evidence of Love focuses on the wealthy, and both A Condor Passes and Roadwalkers offer main characters who move from being very poor to being very rich.

The contrast in Grau's own biography between her lives in New Orleans and in Montgomery is apparent, but the contrasts offered the artist within New Orleans culture itself are extreme. Lewis P. Simpson has speculated on why reasonably few writers stayed in New Orleans long term (Whitman, Dos Passos, Anderson, Faulkner, among others); he thought that perhaps New Orleans was so far removed from the reality of living in America that it offered no enduring metaphor for the American writer—that it was too exotic.⁴ In my work, I have suggested that the vivid contrast between “the city of day” and “the city of night” was stimulating to Tennessee Williams, and the exotic quality of New Orleans set against its materialism was useful to his work. In viewing New Orleans as a city of differences, one might contrast the Vieux Carré with the Garden District, or the tourist culture with housing projects. One might also note the contrasts in New Orleans history—comparing the Creole culture before the Louisiana Purchase to American society after 1803—or set Mardi Gras high society against the homeless wanderers in the streets around Jackson Square. Or one might note the fantasy of Bourbon Street at midnight (a world that escapes time) as well as the reality of the same street in the early morning light (a world in which aged buildings and decaying signs show the ravages of time).

Grau's preoccupation with aging and death in her various stories extends the sense of history and time in New Orleans. In her introduction to George Washington Cable's Old Creole Days, Grau notes especially Cable's interest in the mutability and transience of the old Creole community, as well as his insight into its self-destructive pride. Many of Grau's own characters are overtly self-destructive in much the same way some Creoles were, bringing families and communities down with them, others defining themselves as women alone, set against the culture and time.

A brief survey of Grau's New Orleans work should begin with her early travel pieces for Holiday, continue with “Miss Yellow Eyes” from The Black Prince, focus on The House on Coliseum Street and The Condor Passes, comment on “The Thieves” and “Stanley” in The Wind Shifting West, and conclude with “The Beginning” in Nine Women and its extension into Roadwalkers, where Grau attempts to bring some reconciliation to her world of contrasts and her sense of time.

Grau wrote several pieces for Carnival, but she says that the writing she produced for Holiday in the mid-1950s offered her experience and money. Among several articles that featured houses on the Mississippi River and scenes on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, two focus on New Orleans and indicate that Grau not only knows the city intimately but has an “inside” perception of society. The first of these discusses the merits of Galatoire's restaurant, especially its appeal to New Orleans folk. The descriptions of Galatoire's history, atmosphere, and food are interwoven with family anecdotes about Grau's uncle, who has eaten at Galatoire's “once or twice a week for fifty years.” Grau notes the recent influx of tourists: “An old woman in her seventies, tall, thin, and very much the lady, who has been going to Carnival balls since she was fifteen and can tell you the name of every queen of Comus for the last half-century … laments that you can go into Galatoire's and not see one person that you know.” A later article depicts New Orleans society in Mardi Gras season. Grau describes the Mardi Gras social whirl as experienced by the young and beautiful Queen of Rex, but she also notes the strong family traditions associated with the balls and the parades. For the young queen, “today was the triumph of her life” as a debutante, and she not only remembers dreaming of Mardi Gras as a child but knows too that her grandmother had been carnival royalty and her great-grandfather as well. Accompanying the article are pictures of the cream of New Orleans society, but Grau also notes the “seamy underside” of Mardi Gras. In addition, in a manner reminiscent of Cable, Gayarré, or Grace King, she mentions the carnival activities of the New Orleans Creoles, those descendants of early French and Spanish settlers who “are acutely aware that they are descendants of a brilliant, dashing group.” Now, however, time and lack of money has “left them little more than memories.”⁵

Among Grau's early stories in The Black Prince, the only one with a clear New Orleans setting is “Miss Yellow Eyes.” It is among her best stories of racial conflict. Told by Celia, the fourteen-year-old black sister of Lena, a girl with golden eyes who can pass for white, the story tells of Lena's romance with another light-skinned black, Chris, and their plans to move to Oregon, where they can “become” white. Their plans are destroyed when Chris is killed in Korea and Lena is left to cope with her dark-complexioned brother, Pete, a militant black who belongs to an all-black club with a sign on the door that reads “white entrance to rear.” Grau's use of colors in this story is detailed by Paul Schlueter, but the contrasts in the story are clear. The background of racial complexity in New Orleans is well known, given the history of quadroons and les gens de couleur libre. In “Miss Yellow Eyes,” all avenues lead to despair. Not only is Lena left alone after Chris's death, but Pete, who loses his arm in a switchyard accident, becomes increasingly violent and bitter about Lena and Pete's hopes. In Pete's eyes, Chris has died for nothing, just as their own father had died in an earlier war. Schlueter also notes the religious overtones of death, sacrifice, and names in “Miss Yellow Eyes,” but the racial complexity and contradictions in the story are inextricably connected to New Orleans community and history. Here is a nineteenth-century quadroon story set in the mid-twentieth century, in which no sentiment or happy ending is possible.

Much of the critical commentary on Grau's first novel, The Hard Blue Sky, and on the early stories in The Black Prince, pictures Grau as a “fictional anthropologist,” a distant observer, perhaps even callous in her depiction of the forces of nature and of the primitive people who struggle to survive in a violent world. According to Ann Pearson, in Grau's work “nature is the vision.” Such commentary might apply as well to The House on Coliseum Street, one of Grau's best-known New Orleans novels, in which her objectivity is, as Chester Eisinger suggests, “little short of chilling.” As Linda Wagner-Martin points out, The House on Coliseum Street emphasizes the “ravages of time” with its seasonal structure: June, End of Summer, The House on Coliseum Street, and Winter.⁶ Joan Mitchell's affair with one of her sister's boyfriends is followed by an abortion on the Mississippi Coast, then her obsessive behavior after the abortion as she returns to the house on Coliseum Street, where her family has lived for generations. Joan is indeed a “woman alone” as she rejects the various members of her family and friends around her—her sister Doris; her mother, who has been married five times and has a daughter by each husband; her suitor, Fred Aleman, who would marry her at any time; and finally Michael Kern, whose career she destroys by reporting their affair and the abortion to the dean at the local university. Her settled life on Coliseum Street was hardly settled, given the nature of her mother's family (the last husband still lives alone in the attic), but it is clearly shattered by the abortion and the events that ensue.

On the morning of her first phone call from Michael, Joan observes an aging wino stumble into Coliseum Street and sees the “street close up on itself” before the police come to pick him up. A harbinger, perhaps, but of what? Men, aging, time? Standing where the tramp stood, Joan will remember this event at the end of the story, and she will compare the fact that he disappeared, leaving no trace, to the baby she has lost—“there wasn't anything left of it” (241). When she sees the tramp for the first time, she is looking at him from the security of her bedroom, twenty feet up on the second floor. As the book ends, Joan returns to the house, and while she is locked out in the early morning hours, she identifies herself as the owner of the house, the oldest child, the one with money, but it is a slight victory in the face of her anger, loneliness, and self-destruction. In Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a novel published the same year as The House on Coliseum Street, Binx Bolling faces the existential dilemma posed by the meaninglessness of modern existence, but he has the contexts of southern stoicism and Catholicism as guides, and he has a healthy sense of the absurd. The House on Coliseum Street is a much darker book, and the ending offers little hope, in spite of Joan's fetal position and what we assume will be a new life for her.

Grau's next book, The Keepers of the House, establishes a stronger link between the generations of a family in the rural South and the property that they hold. Again, there is the broad theme of destruction related to miscegenation in the family that is not entirely resolved by the young woman who becomes “the keeper” at story's end. She is, certainly, a much stronger and less self absorbed character than Joan Mitchell, and her concerns are wider, in keeping with the novel's multigenerational story of southern history of which she is a part.

The Condor Passes has not been as highly regarded as The Keepers of the House, but the story it tells about aging, the disintegration of a wealthy family, and the destructive effects of money is readable enough that it qualified as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It is largely set in New Orleans and, as various critics have pointed out, has been unfairly compared to Mario Puzo's The Godfather, published two years earlier. Grau's story focuses on the Mafia-like empire of a New Orleans crime boss, his rise to power from poverty, and his influence on his family and estate, even as a ninety-five-year-old man. In his book on Grau, Schlueter quotes Grau as saying that you can't live in New Orleans and not know many Italian families who've made it big with a start as rumrunners (70). Grau tells the story from multiple perspectives, a technique that she used successfully in The Keepers of the House. The first section, “Stanley,” is told from the point of view of a black valet who has grown wealthy working for “the old man.” As it turns out, the black condor (the symbol of the estate) is associated not only with the old man's death but also with Stanley, especially in the setting of the aviary and greenhouse that opens and closes the book. At the end of the story, Stanley is seen as the condor, with arms that flutter like wings, when the old man dies. Stanley's point of view is useful in describing the family, its wealth, and especially the power of the old man, and his section of the story is reprinted, in a different form, as a story in The Wind Shifting West.

The second section, “The Old Man,” tells us more about Thomas Henry Oliver and his rise from poverty to immense wealth. Born poor in a river town in Ohio, he leaves at age thirteen and makes money immediately in small-time crime—as a burglar, pickpocket, pimp. He went to sea at seventeen, “dealt with everything that could be smuggled,” and is faithful in sending his mother substantial money. He comes to New Orleans after jumping ship in the coastal marsh to escape smallpox, and he soon builds his empire through interests in gambling, real estate, and bootlegging. After his marriage into a respectable family, his family expands to include two daughters, Anna and Margaret, and a Cajun boy, Robert, whom he grooms to be his successor and son-in-law. However, the broad pattern of the novel is not to emphasize the world of wealth/society/respectability versus the world of crime/poverty/violence, though such clearly exists both in the novel and in New Orleans. The strength of the old man is that he has been able to bridge the gap, to revel in the life of the streets while he amasses his fortune. As noted earlier, however, the emphasis in The Condor Passes is on destruction of the various members of Oliver's family, and the various sections of the novel show their individual disintegration. The family, then, will not continue to future generations. The old man's powers are great but shallow, and time and age bring him to a vision of the condor, the bird of death. The Condor Passes shows us that Grau knows quite well the patterns of time and history in the Big Easy.

Wagner-Martin notes that “the immensity of the cultural forces displayed in The Keepers of the House in this novel reach only to Robert's perversity, Anna's self-centeredness, and Margaret's insatiable appetites.”⁷ In comparison with The Keepers of the House, that is, The Condor Passes is a less substantial novel. Wagner-Martin's point is well taken, but the failure and the weakness of these characters in The Condor Passes is Grau's judgment on them as well as our own. In their failure she demonstrates something of the modern world's perversity, certainly as she sees it in New Orleans.

The Wind Shifting West includes one story clearly set in New Orleans, “The Thieves,” as well as “Stanley,” a different version of the black valet section in The Condor Passes. “The Other Way” is a school desegregation story that focuses on a Cajun French-speaking black family, but whether it is set in New Orleans or some other part of Louisiana is not clear. “The Thieves,” set in the French Quarter, tells about a young woman trapped by loneliness. Her parents have returned to Sicily, and her lover, Steve, is a suitor of empty promise. In the action of the story, she spots a burglar in the courtyard below her window, hiding from the police, and she spontaneously whispers to him the way of escape. Later, when Steve arrives to tell her that he is marrying someone else but hopes to continue their relationship, she is able to dismiss him. As Schlueter points out, she realizes that the silence was no emptier after he had left than it had been with him there.⁸ Here is another of Grau's women alone. Sheltered, perhaps, in one world, she sees the predicament of the burglar in the other, “street” world below. By helping him, she somehow finds new strength. His escape from the police parallels her own move to freedom. In The Wind Shifting West, various women, old and young, are faced with problems that focus on their loneliness and the conflicts of one world impinging on another.

Evidence of Love is an extended version of “The Patriarch,” a story in The Wind Shifting West. According to Jean Ross, it is a story of “rootlessness” that is set in several places, all outside the South. She sees it as “losing touch with the Southern settings and characters which are the strengths of Grau's best writing.”⁹ Again, though, the broad problems of aging and time are much in evidence here, as they are in New Orleans stories. Here, the aging male who dominates the action is very much like the old man in A Condor Passes, given the estrangement of his “contrived” family—a son through a surrogate mother. Though the son and the father both lead self-absorbed and ineffectual lives, the daughter-in-law, Lucy, does show “evidence of love” in assisting the old man's choice to die.

Nine Women includes one New Orleans story, “The Beginning,” an early version of the longer story in Roadwalkers. The story establishes direction not only for the rest of the collection but for the novel as well—the strength and determination of women. “The Beginning” announces that the child who tells the story is seen by her mother as “the queen of the world, the jewel of the lotus, the pearl without price, my secret treasure.” The mother is a wonderfully creative and talented black seamstress who gradually builds her trade among the African American community in New Orleans. The child's father was an Indian merchant, a shoe salesman, a “seller of Worthington pumps”; but the mother sees the child, and the child comes to see herself, as an Indian princess. She is the live model on which her mother's creative fashions are displayed. “The Beginning” describes the bond between mother and daughter as well as how the mother steals expensive cloth from the Perfection Cloth Shop. She opens her shop as a modiste in rooms above LeConte's drugstore, a “castle” complete with tower and turret.

The real beginning of the story, however, is told in Roadwalkers, and it reaches much farther back in the life of the mother. We learn in the opening section that the mother had been a homeless child who wandered the roads of the rural South during the 1930s, during the Great Depression. Abandoned by mother and father and left with a grandmother who died, she is the youngest of six children who struggle to survive on the road until only two are left, Baby and her brother Joseph. They survive winters, summers, days, nights, hunger, and breakbone fever. Baby is finally captured on the Aikens Grove plantation, after Joseph's anger becomes so great that he begins to destroy property and kill livestock.

In the second part of Roadwalkers, attention shifts to the story of the man who captures her. He is Charles Tucker, one of “the people of Clark County,” the title of this section. The story of his childhood, while certainly more secure than Baby's, tells us that he is the sort of person who can understand Baby as well as the anger of her brother. He had known something of being left alone himself, before his sister took him in, and knew poverty and hard work. We are able to establish a connection between Charles Tucker and Baby, and we understand something of the larger southern world that brings these two together. In several instances, Charles is fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, as when he establishes a market for his sister's produce with a wealthy family, and in his marriage to the daughter of the manager of Aikens Grove, the position he inherits when her parents are killed. Baby turns out to be a marvelously talented fashion designer, and she does not look back to her childhood. But Grau tells us that Charles Tucker was important in her life. For once, she had the luck to be part of his good fortune.

After Charles captures Baby, he takes her to a Catholic home for children in New Orleans and assumes financial responsibility for her. This section, “The Kindness of Strangers,” focuses on Rita Landry, sixteen and not yet a novice, who is given charge of the black waif brought to the convent. She is a young Acadian woman from the river country outside New Orleans. We learn briefly about her family, her mother's work for the local priest, and the mother's decision that Rita will be a nun. Rita gives Baby the name Mary Woods, and she begins the hard task of teaching her and caring for her. At first, Baby's eyes, “metallic eyes like a knife blade left out in the cold,” remind Rita of eyes she had seen in caged animals at the circus. As the years pass, Rita becomes Sister Celeste, and Mary Woods expresses herself first through silent play, then through wildly extravagant and creative art. At the conclusion of this section, Mary is asked to return to Clark County to work for the household at Aikens Grove, but she disappears mysteriously from the convent. Again, as in “The People of Clark County,” we see the circumstances in Rita Landry's life that bring her into the life of Mary Woods. Though Mary does not ever return to visit Sister Celeste, we establish the connection between them, as well as understand that ultimately the church does not touch Mary Woods. Her spirit had been defined much earlier, as a road-walker.

In the sections that follow, the voice in the novel shifts and becomes that of Nanda Woods, now the thirty-six-year-old daughter of Mary Woods. The section “The Magic Kingdom” includes “The Beginning,” an expanded version of the first story in Nine Women, and a sequel, “The Middle Kingdom.” As the child model in “The Beginning,” Nanda learns from her mother “the greatest enchantment of all: how to walk like a princess in kingdoms of our own making” (181). They live, she says, in two kingdoms—one a fantasy where the mother was queen and the girl was princess, the other, a reality, based on “money and property and the logic of commerce” (182). Nanda wins a scholarship to St. Catherine's, a boarding school run by the Ursuline nuns, some “832 miles about straight north of New Orleans.” Nanda is black in a world of white, and to some degree, she survives because her journey there replicates the journey of her mother, the roadwalker, those many years ago. She has been taught to be a princess, and she somehow insulates herself in “the magic kingdom” against prejudice, patronizing behavior, and noblesse oblige. In Roadwalkers, Nanda Woods succeeds where other young black women fail. The key to her success seems to be her insulation. She knows that she is invisible to some and a symbol to others, but she maintains tight control.

After graduation, Nanda returns to New Orleans to attend college and continues to work with her mother in her shops. In the concluding section of Roadwalkers, “The Promised Land,” both mother and daughter “arrive,” so to speak: the roads that they have walked come to a kingdom that is both magical and real. The mother is financially secure. Her expensive shop, catering to whites, is elegant and successful. She marries a long-time suitor, and they buy a house in the suburbs, complete with brick barbecue, large lawn, and brand-new furniture selected by the daughter. The daughter does well at the university (Phi Beta Kappa) and meets a young black pre-med student whose father is also a doctor. They marry and settle down to a well-to-do life of travel and luxury apartments and finally, at the end, to a home in the suburbs.

What is Grau telling us here? The ending of Roadwalkers has been criticized by those who say it offers an easy and superficial accommodation to materialism and suburban life by two women whose early lives should make them remarkably different. Have they been roadwalkers all this distance just to come to a brick barbecue, and to come to it so easily? Any assessment of “The Promised Land” section, must not, however, be so quick to rush to pass judgment on these two women or on Shirley Ann Grau. For Grau, the mere presence of houses and marriages does not make the promised land, though they are important, as we know from the emphasis on houses and shelter throughout her work. There is more, and she knows it. The tone that pervaded Nanda's voice when she was an “invisible” student at school, or when she was her mother's princess in the magic kingdom, continues here. After Nanda completes her final exams at the end of her freshman year, she takes fried chicken and champagne and “intrudes” at the home of a white art professor at the university, where she learns once again what it means to be black in a white world. She also learns the limits of marriage, since she and her husband have both had affairs that they can “number.” At the end of the novel, though, she does have a moment with her husband—“something between us, something that hovered in the air between us. A thread, frail, thin, to be measured in millimeters, but there nonetheless. For that one instant, it seemed I could see it—fine as a spider's web, shimmering with all of the colors of crystal—then it was gone. We smiled at each other, cautiously, warily, as we walked back across the worm-infested lawn” (292). So, she says, she comes into her kingdom alone.

This “moment” is a wonderful thing, one of the things in the promised land that really matter, but it is transitory, as we are made to see. In her remarks on Grau's various novels and stories before Roadwalkers, Linda Wagner-Martin suggests that “so much attention to the act of dying is unusual”; she is thinking especially about the aging and dying patriarchs in The Condor Passes and Evidence of Love, among others, and about patriarchy in general.¹⁰ Grau's women, in contrast, are survivors, though they are frequently death-haunted. The “worm-infested lawn” Nanda and her husband walk across at the end of the novel is one more symbol for the roadwalker of the terms of the journey; death is ever present. Grau's promised land is material, but it is magical as well; it has to do with Nanda's understanding her own self-sufficiency in the face of death and time and how she translates her magic kingdom into reality—her “portion, neither more or less” (292).

New Orleans has a great deal to do with Grau's art beyond providing specific settings. It offers a stimulating world of contrasts—black/white, rich/poor, day/night—that are sometimes difficult to reconcile. It also juxtaposes two kingdoms, one real, with money and property, and the other a fantasy, a world of carnival and magic. As Nanda Woods realizes, however, both are “kingdoms of our own making” (181). In Grau's early New Orleans work, such as The House on Coliseum Street and The Condor Passes, her characters struggle to glimpse any magic at all. New Orleans and history, as well as the current setting, are constant reminders of the need for insight into the issues of aging, death, time, and self-destruction. Grau's use of New Orleans helps us see that all of her characters are roadwalkers, as are we, though they and we are rarely as fortunate as Nanda Woods, able to turn the magic into reality.

Notes

1. All of Shirley Ann Grau's works of fiction were published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York. Page references for quotations are inserted parenthetically in the text.

2. Paul Schlueter, “Shirley Ann Grau,” in Fifty Southern Writers After 1900, ed. Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain (New York, 1987), 225; Elzbieta Olesky, “Keepers of the House: Scarlett O'Hara and Abigail Howland,” in Louisiana Women Writers: New Essays and a Comprehensive Bibliography, ed. Dorothy Brown and Barbara Ewell (Baton Rouge, 1992), 169–82; Linda Wagner-Martin, “Shirley Ann Grau's Wise Fictions,” in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, ed. Tonnette B. Inge (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1990), 145.

3. Anthony Bukoski, “The Burden of Home: Shirley Ann Grau's Fiction,” Critique, XXVII (1987), 181–93.

4. Lewis P. Simpson, “New Orleans as a Literary Center: Some Problems,” in Literary New Orleans, ed. Richard S. Kennedy (Baton Rouge, 1992), 76–88.

5. Shirley Ann Grau, “Galatoire's of New Orleans,” Holiday, XX (October, 1956), 66; Grau, “New Orleans Society,” Holiday, XXIII (March, 1958), 119.

6. Ann Pearson, “Shirley Ann Grau: Nature Is the Vision,” Critique, XVIII (1975), 47; Chester Eisinger, “Grau, Shirley Ann,” in Contemporary Novelists, ed. James Vinson (New York, 1972), 515; Wagner-Martin, “Shirley Ann Grau's Wise Fictions,” in Southern Women Writers, ed. Inge, 148.

7. Wagner-Martin, “Shirley Ann Grau's Wise Fictions,” in Southern Women Writers, ed. Inge, 156.

8. Paul Schlueter, Shirley Ann Grau (Boston, 1981), 130.

9. Jean Ross, “Shirley Ann Grau,” Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit, 1978), 11, 213.

10. Wagner-Martin, “Shirley Ann Grau's Wise Fictions,” in Southern Women Writers, ed. Inge, 158.