SOURCE: Richardson, Thomas. “Local Color in Louisiana.” In The History of Southern Literature, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., pp. 199-208. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

In the following essay, Richardson describes the work of the major local color writers of the New South.

When the journalist Edward King visited New Orleans in early 1873 as representative of “The Great South” series for Scribner's, he discovered more for his Northern audience than he or his editors, J. G. Holland and R. W. Gilder, could have expected. “Louisiana to-day is Paradise Lost,” he wrote. “In twenty years it may be Paradise Regained. … It is the battle of race with race, of the picturesque and unjust civilization of the past with the prosaic and leveling civilization of the present.” King was perceptive, and the conflicts he described—past versus present, Creole versus American, black versus white, traditional versus progressive values...