New Orleans Native Sarah Broom, Winner, The National Book Award, is shown here at home in the Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans. Ms. Broom will appear at Faulkner for All, 2026.
The Triumph of American Literature
The Faulkner Society is putting together a classy line-up of celebrated authors for its annual festival, Faulkner for All, September 24 through September 28, 2026. This is the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution and, as a tip of the hat to the anniversary, the Society has selected as its humanities theme for public programming:
The Triumph of American Literature.
The theme is taken from the subtitle of an important new non-fiction work by the legendary American literary editor Gerald Howard, who until his retirement was Executive Editor and Vice President of Doubleday Books and is a role model for agents and editors in the American publishing industry. The book is The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the 
Triumph of American Literature. It is the fascinating story of how one talented and determined literary editor, Malcolm Cowley, rescued William Faulkner’s career when at mid-point it was dead with most of his work out of print. Without Cowley, it is unlikely that Faulkner would have been awarded the Nobel Prize. A genius at promotion and media manipulation, Malcolm Cowley dreamed up the idea of an accessible Faulkner book for readers to re-acquaint them with the work of Faulkner, work Cowley believed was masterful and worthy of saving for posterity. The book, The Portable Faulkner, started out as a series of articles about 
Faulkner that Cowley had published. The book, then, was a success and Cowley was off and running, grooming Faulkner for the Nobel Prize. Describing Cowley, Gerald Howard says:
He didn’t have a program or a thesis. He had taste. He was just a pure creature of literature, immensely versatile and conversant with everything that seemed to matter in the literary universe.
Howard will be our keynote speaker and make two additional appearances.
Among other star-power headliners will be Sarah Broom, winner of the National Book Award for her remarkable memoir, The Yellow House. She has accepted our invitation to participate in three events, including an advice session for adult writers and a special evening event in conversation with bestselling author, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, also a New 
Orleans native, author of We Cast a Shadow, The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, and The American Daughters.
Sarah and Maurice will explore the ways that
Afro-American storytelling traditions have helped pave the way for The Triumph of American Literature.
A third native New Orleanian, Nicholas Lemann, a distinguished journalist—longtime correspondent for The New Yorker, former dean of Columbia University’s journalism school, and a former writer for The Atlantic—has spent decades writing about the biggest American themes: race, the South, the rise and fall of the meritocracy in critically acclaimed non-fiction books. He will zero in on the important contributions of Jewish writers to The Triumph of American Literature. Lemann’s new book is a me
moir:
Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries. The Atlantic comments:
In telling the story of his ancestors’ relationship with America and Jewishness, as well as his own, Lemann offers surprising and sometimes unsettling new perspectives on what it means to be an American Jew today.
T. R. Johnson—Professor of English at Tulane University and popular contemporary jazz showhost for WWOZ, the New Orleans radio station famous for its music programming—is not a New Orleanian by birth but he knows the Crescent City inside and out. He edited for Cambridge University Press a collection of 26 essays called New Orleans: A Literary History. His new book, also published by Cambridge, is New Orleans: A Writer’s City, which as received widespread acclaim from people who know New Orleans well.
David Simon, for instance, the man who created the poplular TV series The Wire and Treme, is high on it: A thoughtful, comprehensive stations-of-the-cross journey through the literary history and traditions of a city that has done more, pound for pound, to create our American culture than any other city.