There really was a streetcar named Desire. It went out of business about a year after Tennessee Williams published his eponymous 1947 play set in sultry New Orleans, a town that has hosted and inspired the award-winning writer and a legion of other literary luminaries from William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson to Anne Rice and John Kennedy Toole.
The city itself becomes a character in many of the novels, short stories, and tales penned by those who have given in to its seductive appeal—the music, the food, the history, the architecture, and more. While you
