Starting with What Matters, Part 15: Walker Percy

Walker Percy's essay "New Orleans, Mon Amour" amounts to a philosophical love letter to the city that serves as the setting for his first and most famous novel, The Moviegoer. Percy imaginatively begins the article, which first appeared in Harper's (September 1968), with this paragraph:

If the American city does not go to hell in the next few years, it will not be the likes of Dallas or Grosse Point which will work its deliverance, or Berkeley or New Haven, or Santa Fe or La Jolla. But New Orleans might. Just as New Orleans hit upon jazz, the only unique American contribution to art, and hit upon it almost by accident and despite itself, it could also hit upon the way of the hell which has overtaken the American city. 

In the paragraphs that follow the opening, Percy gives every reason to believe that New Orleans will, in fact, be the first American city to go to hell. He stacks the intellectual deck so fiercely against his beloved city that a historically uniformed or linguistically careless reader might conclude The Big Easy is doomed to an abominable self-destruction. 

But not so. Percy was a lifelong resident of the Deep South, save a journey north to obtain a medical degree from Columbia University, practice medicine in New York City, and convalesce from tuberculous in Saranac Lake, New York. He cared deeply about New Orleans, writing about it in fiction and nonfiction. His admiration of the city despite its complexities, calamities, and perversities is legendary. You can read "New Orleans, Mon Amour" Percy's 1991 nonfiction collection Signposts in a Strange Land.