Literary St. Louis: A Guide (Volume 1) - Softcover

About the Editors

Lorin Cuoco is a former arts reporter and associate director of the International Writers Center.

William H. Gass is an internationally acclaimed novelist and essayist. He is founder of the International Writers Center at Washington University, from which he recently retired.

Downtown would eventually be dotted with the rooming houses where writers like Dreiser and Inge stayed, or dwellings where Grant tried to make a go of it and Reedy lived, as well as buildings where the newspapers were written and published, or offices like those in the Security Building where Reedy presided and Winston Churchill collected material for his novels. Zoë Akins hung out at the Old Post Office, where her father worked, while her friend Orrick Johns could be found at the St. Louis Public Library. The Downtown YMCA offered a room to Joseph Pennell, who got even by lodging the protagonist of Rome Hanks there, while the Hotel Jefferson furnished the site for two famous poker games, one described in Richard Jessup's novel The Cincinnati Kid (though the movie makers moved the game to New Orleans), and the one which cost Tennessee Williams’s father part of his ear and maybe his career.