by J. Michael Warner
$24.95 – University of Louisiana Press
Coming August 2025!
Purchase Links Coming Soon
About the Book
Charles Whitfield Richards: The Artist and His Circle is the first book-length biography of Charles Whitfield Richards, an artist and journalist whose career spanned the Mississippi Delta to Jazz Age Paris to modern New Orleans. He found himself at the center of the New Orleans art community from the 1930s to the 1990s, and illustrated Jeanne deLavigne’s memorable book, Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans. Born in the Mississippi Delta in 1906, Richards showed early talent for writing and drawing. But a string of tragedies drove Richards to an itinerant lifestyle. Irresistible wanderlust led him to drop out of school and travel, first with a circus and then as a merchant marine. He studied art in Kansas City and Paris before his 1927 arrival in New Orleans. From then until the 1940s, he served as correspondent for major newspapers throughout the South and in New York. But job anxieties forced Richards to leave newspaper work in 1945 and turn full time to portraiture and landscape painting, while maintaining New Orleans as his hub.
Praise for Charles Whitfield Richards
The author’s research is marvelously rigorous, and some of the book is based on extensive interviews he conducted with Richards before he died in 1992. Richards was a prodigiously gifted man, and intriguingly mercurial as well. He seemed temperamentally doomed to suffer an endlessly turbulent romantic history, one well documented—with meticulousness but without prurience—by Warner. This edifying biography brings not only Richards to life, but also the always-evolving artistic culture of the South, as vibrant as it was fraught.
— Kirkus Reviews (Read the full review here)
J. Michael Warner’s illuminating biography of Charles Whitfield Richards is a window into a world that feels gone in many respects, but also still present in the streets and buildings of the French Quarter and in the people who cherish it.
— Daniel Hammer, Director, The Historic New Orleans Collection
Warner captivates readers with the vividly rendered adventures of artist Charles Richards and an engaging panoply of his bohemian friends, following them through 1920s Paris, New York and later, the ever-fascinating French Quarter.
— Ellis Anderson, Publisher of The French Quarter Journal and author of Under Surge, Under Siege
About the Author
J. Michael Warner grew up in New Orleans, where he learned how to write a good story and cook the best bread pudding. Formerly General Counsel for a San Francisco Bay Area biotech, he now writes fiction and nonfiction. Michael holds a Diploma in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge, and Charles Whitfield Richards was a Finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for Nonfiction Book.
ISBN 978-1-959569-27-5 | Paperback | 276 pp. | 6″ x 9″ | August 2025
© 2025 J. Michael Warner
University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press • P.O. Box 43558 • Lafayette, LA 70504
