Literary Landmark

Sherwood Anderson first came to the Quarter in 1922 for seven weeks and told Gertrude Stein it was the most civilized place he had found in America. The Double Dealer printed his love letter to the city that year. He returned in the summer of 1924 with his new wife, Elizabeth, and rented an apartment in the Upper Pontalba Building, where William Faulkner stayed briefly and Dos Passos and Sandburg visited. He finished Dark Laughter in two months, and it became his only bestseller. By September 1925 he hoped never to spend another summer in the city.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Cabildo — steps away
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — steps away
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — steps away
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• Congo Square — 0.4 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.

More markers nearby

• Upper Pontalba Building — steps away
• The Cabildo — steps away
• Don Bernardo de Galvez — steps away
• David Bannister Morgan — steps away