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Yeah, I think A Confederacy of Dunces is probably the perfect New Orleans book.

You can do but one of these things; it is folly to attempt anything else, for there cannot exist a slave confederacy and a free confederacy side by side upon this continent.

Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period - the Sixties - I rejected those things when I went north.

Speaking as a writer, it would be difficult to find an event in American history more dramatic and riveting than the Civil War.

According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.

I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one.

Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.

My ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; I was raised in Natchez, Miss.; I performed in the Confederate Pageant for a decade; I dug ditches and loaded trucks with black men who taught me more than any book ever could; and I graduated from Ole Miss. Anyone who survived that is a de facto expert on the South.

Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.