SOURCE: “Roadwalker in the Magic Kingdom: Shirley Ann Grau,” in Literary New Orleans in the Modern World, Louisiana State University Press, 1998, pp. 123-35.

In the following essay, Richardson looks at the context of critical commentary on Grau and lists some observations of his own about Grau's fiction.

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...