New Orleans, La.
Dedicated: 1999
Opened in 1886, Hotel Monteleone and the Carousel Bar & Lounge (built in 1949) has seen many literary guests and has appeared in many stories. Guests have included Sherwood Anderson, Anne Rice, and Lyle Saxon. Literary works have included Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers (1992), Gerald Clarke’s Capote: A Biography (1988), Richard Ford’s A Piece of My Heart (1976), Erle Stanley Gardner’s Owls Don’t Blink (1942), Harry Stephen Keeler’s The Voice of the Seven Sparrows (1929), Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996), and Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green (1941). New Orleans born author and Federal Writers’ Project employee Innis Patterson Truman jumped to her death from the hotel’s twelfth floor in 1942.
Guests can stay in suites inspired by the five authors, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, and Eudora Welty. William Faulkner stayed here while receiving the French Legion of Honor Award in 1951. Truman Capote’s mother went into labor while a guest at the hotel and was assisted by the staff to Touro Hospital, where he was born. Tennessee Williams was a frequent guest and featured the hotel in his play, The Rose Tattoo (1951). Ernest Hemingway was also a guest and mentioned the Carousel Bar & Lounge in his short story, “The Night Before Battle” (1939). The Carousel Bar & Lounge is also featured in Eudora Welty’s short story, “The Purple Hat” (1941).
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