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The Decadent Double Dealer - 64 Parishes

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Winter 2025

The Decadent Double Dealer

New Orleans’s national literary magazine of the 1920s

by<br>Katie Nunnery

Published: December 1, 2025

Last Updated: March 5, 2026

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Courtesy of HNOC

The Double Dealer, August-September 1921 cover and back cover. Leonhardt, Olive (cover artist).

In 1921, four ambitious young writers living in New Orleans—Julius Weis Friend, Basil Thompson, Albert Goldstein, and John McClure—seized upon the idea to begin publishing their own literary magazine. Out of 204 Baronne Street, they began the forty-two-issue run of The Double Dealer. The magazine is often viewed as part of literary modernism due to its publication of early work by writers who would go on to become Modernist superstars, including William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. But the scholarly focus on the magazine’s connections to modernism obscures another vital literary movement that the Double Dealer helped to revitalize: decadence.

Emerging in the late nineteenth century, decadence embraced indulgence, experimentation, languor, and a rejection of conservative nineteenth-century mores. Through social and cultural transvaluation, the “ugly,” “sinful,” and “diseased” was rendered as beautiful. This avant-garde movement attracted poets, essayists, short story writers, drinkers, opium users, queer men and women, aesthetes, classicists, Francophiles, “New Women,” socialists, Catholics, and others who lived against the grain of social norms. In their writing and art, they played across languages, forms, and the senses to push the boundaries of genre and what counted as art. Sometimes the result was grotesquely self-indulgent, focused on the individual’s hedonistic experience and egotistic self-aggrandizement. Sometimes the result was politically progressive, anti-industrial and anti-capitalist, and challenging to the heteronormative status quo.

Most histories of the movement begin with French poets, like Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, and prose writers, like Guy de Maupassant and Joris-Karl Huysmans. These writers turned an aesthetic eye on, among other things, decomposing bodies, the cracking makeup of can-can dancers, and the exotic monstrosity of the hothouse plant.

Courtesy of HNOC

British decadence splashed in its own playful humor and “aestheticism.” Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde argued for “art for art’s sake,” Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson wrote rich and elaborate poetry, and Max Beerbohm and Hubert Crackanthorpe wrote tongue-in-cheek essays about the superiority of artifice over nature.  The Decadent movement drove an influx of “little magazines,” literary periodicals including The Savoy, The Chameleon, and, most famously, The Yellow Book. With their editorial choices and their design—particularly the artistic stylings of Aubrey Beardsley—these periodicals helped set the tone for the British movement, establishing conventions that The Double Dealer would later embrace.

The magazine [published] early work by writers who would go on to become Modernist superstars, including William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.

In the United States, the initial thrust of decadence didn’t capture quite as much attention, though a smattering of aecrtists aligned with the movement, including writers associated with Louisiana such as Kate Chopin and Lafcadio Hearn. However, American decadence saw a 1920s revival. Authors dove back into literary excess, artifice, and strangeness with all of the enthusiasm of the Jazz Age. This came with second flurry of little magazines, including The Little Review, The Dial, and New Orleans’s Double Dealer.

The flowering of literary decadence in New Orleans makes a certain amount of sense. In his book Three Hundred Years of Decadence (LSU Press, 2019), Robert Azzarello paints a vivid picture of New Orleans’s resonance with the aesthetic preoccupations of the decadence movement:

brick buildings crumbling into red dust, houses half-eaten by termites and cat’s claw, water rising from the ground, wooden frames rotting from the inside out, mold growing and paint chipping away. […] Then there is the litany of vices: prostitution and miscegenation, homosexuality and gender deviance, and more than one of the seven deadly sins. Add to this list the city’s stubborn Francophilia, its Afro-Caribbean connection, its Catholicism, its air of mystery and detection, its preoccupations with the dead and the undead, its seemingly perpetual state of human violence, and a strange pattern starts to emerge.

Many of the signature characteristics of New Orleans—its mix of French, Spanish, and Afro-Caribbean cultural influences; its permissiveness and freedom; and its environmental precarity—have historically been and continue to be both praised and criticized as “decadent.” It is no coincidence that New Orleans’s biggest celebration of LGBTQ life is called...