Thomas J. Adams, University of Sydney

Into the Night: Reconstructing a World of Transient Labor in the Fact and Fiction of Jim Crow Era New Orleans
Using three disparate novels; Frances Nimmo Greene's forgotten sentimental novel of the Hennessy Riots, Into the Night: A New Orleans Story (1909), Nelson Algren's A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), and John Rechy's City of Night (1963), this paper maps a variety of depictions of transient labor and the relationship of these depiction to the changing political economy of the Jim Crow city, shifts in the migratory labor networks of the pre-Civil Rights Act South, and the broad problems and opportunities that New Orleans during this period presents for reconstructing the social and political world of laboring-class southerners.