Residence New Orleans, Louisiana Role Author Name Harnett Kane | Years active 1931-c. 1967 Alma mater Tulane University | |
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Born 1910 New Orleans, Louisiana, USA Occupation Author of the American South Died September 4, 1984, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States Books Natchez on the Mississippi, The Southern Christma, Huey Long's Louisiana, The lady of Arlington, Gone are the Days | ||
Education Tulane University (1931) | ||
Harnett Thomas Kane (November 8, 1910 – September 4, 1984) was an author of some thirty books of Louisiana and southern history, geography, culture, and fiction. Stricken with Alzheimer's disease in his middle fifties, he was unable to write for the last seventeen years of his life.
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Career
A native of New Orleans, Kane is best known for Huey Long's Louisiana Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship, 1928–1940, a 1941 study of the corruption of the Long political dynasty in his home state. His 1943 work Bayous of Louisiana examines the major bayous of Louisiana. In the chapter "The Opulent Teche", he refers to Bayou Teche, which flows in South Louisiana through Iberia, St. Landry, St. Martin and St. Mary parishes, as "the most handsomely endowed of the bayous"
Other Kane works are Plantation Parade (a look at early plantation houses in Louisiana), Deep Delta Country, Spies for the Blue and the Gray, Natchez on the Mississippi, Young Mark Twain and the Mississippi, Queen New Orleans, The Southern Christmas Cookbook, The Ursulines: Nuns of Adventure, Gone Are the Days, and The Romantic South.
The Lady of Arlington is Kane's 1953 novel based on the life of Mary Anna Custis Lee, the wife of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who was a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. The Gallant Mrs. Stonewall is a 1957 novel based on Confederate General Stonewall Jackson and his second wife, Mary Anna Jackson, known as the "widow of the Confederacy." Bride of Fortune is Kane's 1948 novel of Varina Howell Davis, the second wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The Smiling Rebel is his 1955 novel based on the Confederate spy Belle Boyd of Front Royal, Virginia.
Kane wrote book reviews and travel articles for Reader's Digest, The New York Times, Saturday Review, and National Geographic. He began writing while attending Tulane University, from which he graduated in 1931. He became a reporter for several years for the defunct New Orleans Item newspaper.
Upon his death in New Orleans at the age of seventy-three, Kane was survived by two sisters from New Orleans, Florence K. Reynolds and Anne Kane.
A Kane admirer terms him one of the "undersung" authors of Louisiana topics, who "knew his state well and chronicled the landscape, the people, and the culture better than any [other] ... he is unsurpassed for description, concrete detail, and for conveying the voices of [the] people ..."