My New Orleans, Gone Away: A Memoir of Loss and Renewal

ISBN: 1883285569

Author: Wolf, Peter

Condition: New

Written with humor and telling detail, My New Orleans contains rare insight about the social structure of New Orleans; student life at Exeter, Tulane and Yale; the thrill of original scholarship; around the world travel before jets; medical school trauma; ingrained southern racism, and anti-Semitism; and American students role in anti-Vietnam uprisings in Paris. In the background, he traces the rags to riches rise and fall of his citys and his familys engagement in the cotton, sugar and retail trades. After a year of medical school at Columbia, and continuing his journey of self-discovery, Wolf returns to New Orleans to work in his fathers cotton brokerage and simultaneously earns a masters degree at Tulane. In spite of a spicy love affair, his residence in a glorious French Quarter courtyard, his purchase of a dilapidated building he expects to restore, and growing prominence in his community, Wolf returns to the east. He completes doctoral studies at NYU and becomes an architectural historian, a profession in which he earns considerable prominence. The authors complicated and achingly explored romantic life is slammed to a close by a saucy, waspy, ex-pat from Texas whom he meets in Paris during his year as a Fulbright scholar, and subsequently marries. Reflecting the yearnings and anxieties of a generation that came of age after World War II, this is the iconic journey of a restless man who leaves the hometown he loves to discover the world, and in so doing, to find himself. My New Orleans offers a penetrating and memorable account of a fading period of Americas evolution, turbulence and possibilities, as unique as the city of Wolfs memory.