The House on Coliseum Street

Shirley Ann Grau

Apr 2012 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

A provocative novel of a New Orleans woman’s heartbreaking decision, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Keepers of the House.

Joan Mitchell has two suitors, and can’t decide whom to marry. A witness to her mother Aurelie’s less than successful romantic history, she’d like to skip marriage altogether. Joan and Aurelie live together in a beautiful French Quarter home on Coliseum Street in New Orleans, along with Joan’s many half-sisters born of Aurelie’s five disastrous marriages.
 
Joan lives a mostly carefree life, but when she becomes pregnant, she chooses to end her pregnancy rather than marry a man she doesn’t love—a decision with grave consequences in conservative 1950s New Orleans.
 
The second novel by a National Book Award finalist and one of the most acclaimed voices of the American South, The House on Coliseum Street is a brave, heartbreaking love letter to New Orleans and “a sad, wistful, young, timeless story, graced by [Shirley Ann Grau’s] fine drawn perceptions . . . and by the still, soft enchantment of her prose” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
 
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Shirley Ann Grau, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

 

About the author

Shirley Ann Grau (1929–2020) was the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist of nine novels and short story collections set primarily in her native South. Grau was raised in Alabama and Louisiana, and many of her novels document the broad social changes of the Deep South during the twentieth century, particularly as they affected African Americans. Grau’s first novel, The Hard Blue Sky (1958), about the descendants of European pioneers living on an island off the coast of Louisiana, established her as a master of vivid description, of both characters and locale, a style she maintained throughout her career. Her public profile rose during the civil rights movement, when her dynastic novel Keepers of the House (1964), which dealt with race relations in Alabama, earned her the Pulitzer Prize.