James Lee Burke

Burke was born in Houston in 1936, grew up on the Gulf Coast, and later kept a home in New Iberia with his wife. The Dave Robicheaux series began with The Neon Rain in 1987. His earlier novel The Lost Get-Back Boogie was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He has won Edgar Awards for Black Cherry Blues, Cimarron Rose and Flags on the Bayou, and in 2009 Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master. Alec Baldwin and Tommy Lee Jones have both played Robicheaux on film. A statue of him was unveiled downtown in 2024.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.1 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 8.2 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.7 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.

More markers nearby

• William G. "Bunk" Johnson — steps away
• George Rodrigue — steps away
• The Steamboat Era — steps away
• Kathleen Babineaux Blanco — steps away