Overview

Quarter Time is a love letter to the French Quarter. Its seven linked short stories recount the friendships and love affairs of the young and vulnerable Jake Devlin, the author's avatar, as he encounters the denizens of the French Quarter: petty thieves, barflies, and artists. A semi-fictional narrative based on firsthand experience, this book captures with heartbreaking candor the human landscape of a unique time and place: the Big Easy of the late 1950s and early '60s. The names of the main characters have been changed, but the events--bizarre and poignant--are factual.

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9781959569343

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Reviews

""A faubourg of writers, artists, and musicians, Quarter Time is a locale of dark humor, in- toxication, crime, corruption, and racism, which James Dormon explores in these portraits of criminality, sexuality, and social mores at a particular time and place."" --Nicole Pepinster Greene, PhD, former head of the English department at Xavier University ""Dorman does not ignore the Quarter's gritty side, but his attraction to its charms and color are everywhere apparent. And as his affection for it is contagious, the reader will inevitably share the experience."" --Ann B. Dobie, PhD, professor emerita at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette ""In James Dormon's mid-1950s French Quarter, Faulkner's specter still hovers over that magic square. Tennessee Williams's lonely, trapped figures roam. The novel's drift and repetition motive carries echoes of Joyce, Debussy, and Maeterlinck too as it anticipates the Quarter narratives of the likes of James Nolan and Maurice Carlos Ruffin. A gem truly worthy of the place and its stories."" --Darrell Bourque, former Louisiana Poet Laureate, author of Megan's Guitar and Until We Talk

Author Information

James Hunter Dormon (1936-2021), professor emeritus of history and American studies, taught at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette for over thirty years. A celebrated teacher and author of numerous scholarly books and articles, Dr. Dormon was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow (1978-1979) and the recipient of a Fulbright professorship, University of Warwick, England (1980). In his writings and classroom practice, he explored race and ethnicity during the turbulent years of the Civil Rights Struggle. His fictionalized memoir, Crossing Rampart Street (2013), brought to life the experience of a white north Louisiana-born, middle-class youth coming to terms with the confounding ambiguities of a racially divided South. A passionate French Quarterite both in his youth and in retirement, he immortalized the ethnic mix and street culture of the Big Easy in a series of short stories that were left in draft when he died of COVID-related pneumonia in 2021. Gloria K. Fiero is a UL Lafayette professor emerita and author of the textbooks The Humanistic Tradition and Landmarks in Humanities (McGraw-Hill).

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