“In a 1980 essay titled “Why I Live Where I Live,” Walker Percy (who lived in Covington, La.) wrote: “New Orleans may be too seductive for a writer. Known hereabouts as the Big Easy, it may be too easy, too pleasant. Faulkner was charmed to a standstill and didn’t really get going until he returned to Mississippi and invented his county.” In an earlier essay Percy praised the city for its lingering friendliness: “If you fall ill on the streets of New York, people grumble about having to step over you or around you. In New Orleans there is still a chance, diminishing perhaps, that somebody will drag you into the neighborhood bar and pay the innkeeper for a shot of Early Times.” ”
