In the 1920s, when so many of the most exciting new American writers had expatriated to Paris to make their names, New Orleans was often known as the “poor man’s Paris,” because the Louisiana city offered writers and artists many of the French mecca’s cultural advantages while allowing them to keep their feet safely grounded on American soil, where home was often just a quick trainride away.

s anyone who’s had the pleasure of living in Paris knows, there’s no substitute for the City of Lights, but even though New Orleans has nothing on the scale of the Louvre or Notre Dame or Saint Chapelle (or of the amazing crush of the Île-de-France’s artistic and historical landmarks), it has a profoundly rich and deep-rooted cultural heritage that’s almost as Francophone as it is diversely American.

And while France had the Russian Stravinsky in residence in the 1920s (along with so many other foreign pilgrims and exiles), New Orleans was the home of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and Kid Ory, who at the time were virtually inventing America’s national music.

In January of 1925, William Faulkner, a twenty-seven-year-old writer from Oxford, Mississippi who was to mold many of his country’s endless varieties of civilization into a mythic literary universe, arrived in New Orleans, ostensibly to book passage and leave for England right away. But then in the six months that he ended up staying in the city before embarking for Europe (Italy at first, and then Paris), he began writing the stories that lay the foundation for the vast body of work that would eventually garner him the Nobel Prize for literature.

Faulkner had been a poet in Mississippi, and he deliberately made the decision to begin writing fiction as he was planning his exodus, and when he arrived in New Orleans he found a thriving literary community that had a handful of leading publications for new writers (particularly The Double Dealer, which had published a poem of Faulkner’s in 1922 and which regularly featured the work of such writers as Hart Crane, Djuna Barnes, Robert Penn Warren, Ezra Pound, Malcolm Cowley, Thornton Wilder, Allen Tate, and Edmund Wilson).

Presiding over the New Orleans literary scene was ex-Ohioan Sherwood Anderson (author of the wonderful and enormously influential Winesburg, Ohio), and Anderson and his wife were extremely hospitable to the young Faulkner, whom they allowed to stay at their house for a while in January of 1925 and whom they often took out for walks and boatrides when Anderson wasn’t off on his many lecture tours.

After what was supposed to be a last visit home to Mississippi in February of 1925, Faulkner returned to New Orleans once again to embark for Europe, but rather than leaving immediately, he took rooms at 624 Orleans Alley (now called Pirates Alley), near the rear of St. Louis Cathedral. His apartment is now a bookstore called Faulkner House Books, and this is where a friend recently bought me a copy of New Orleans Sketches, the collection of Faulkner’s first published prose works, which he largely wrote in the five months that he lived at this prime spot in the French Quarter.

In January and February of that year, he wrote a series of very short sketches entitled “New Orleans,” which he sold to The Double Dealer for a small fee. These sketches comprise eleven reflections on the city written in the voices of a variety of the denizens that Faulkner observed in his nightly perambulations (and imaginings/intuitions). The most affecting of these are the last three of the series—“The Artist,” “Magdalen,” and “The Tourist”—which delve not just into what Faulkner saw on the street but what he saw inside the mirrors of his own growing creativity, and as the months passed he expanded upon several of these sketches’ themes and scenarios to create some of the best pieces collected in New Orleans Sketches.

As the collection’s editor, Carvel Collins, points out with great acuity in his exceptionally useful and well-researched Introduction, Faulkner would later expand even further upon many of these sketches’ themes and concerns in several of his greatest novels.

Faulkner soon found that he could support himself by selling sketches to the New Orleans newspaper the Times-Picayune, and the title of his first sketch, “Mirrors of Chartres Street,” became the subtitle of many of the other pieces for the newspaper, which began publishing one of his sketches every few weeks, from February until a few months after he’d left for Europe.

One of the other most affecting stories is “The Kid Learns,” which concerns an up-and-coming pimp who decides to muscle in on a much more powerful and experienced man’s territory, knowing that he’s still years away from being able to pull off such a coup. The story itself seems at first to be just a hardboiled sketch of lowlife machination, but it’s not just the kid who learns in “The Kid Learns.” It’s also Faulkner who learns, his imagination taking the story into the beyond as the kid meets “Little sister Death” at the tale’s end—a reference to Saint Francis of Assisi’s deathbed addition to his “Canticle of Creatures” that shows Faulkner expanding his creative palette to include the penetrations of mystery into his character’s lives (and deaths).