In August 2025, the University of Louisiana Press will publish CHARLES WHITFIELD RICHARDS: THE ARTIST AND HIS CIRCLE, the first book-length biography of this seminal figure.

Charles Whitfield Richards was one of New Orleans’ and the Gulf South’s leading journalists, painters and sculptors in the 1940s through his death in 1992.

Author J. Michael Warner began collecting information on Richards in 1984 and held nearly twenty hours of recorded interviews with him.

Richards’ career spanned 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. This 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 mid-1940s, he served as correspondent for newspapers throughout the South and in New York.

Richards’ insightful interviews of prominent personalities, illustrated by his own hand, earned enduring fans. But job anxieties forced Richards to leave newspaper work in 1945 and turn full time to portraiture and landscape painting, while making New Orleans his hub. Recognized as a genuine French Quarter character, Richards had a lasting influence on New Orleans art and on notable figures in the city’s culture.

Warner’s book, Charles Whitfield Richards: The Artist and His Circle, covers the artist’s life from his youth in Rome, Mississippi to his death on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1992.

The book was named Finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for Non-Fiction.

In addition, the book provides biographical sketches of many of the key figures in Richards’ life, including artists Noel Rockmore, Morris Henry Hobbs, and Enrique Alférez, bouquiniste Bertha Rolfe, gallery owner Larry Borenstein, author Roark Bradford, and others.

Charles Whitfield Richards: The Artist and His Circle will be available directly from University of Louisiana Press, from local book shops, and online.

What People Are Saying About Charles Whitfield Richards: The Artist and His Circle

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. . . . An incisive and enlightening snapshot of a neglected artist and his time.

— Kirkus Reviews

The New Orleans we know in the 2020s would not be the same if it weren’t for the artists and lovers of the French Quarter of the 1920s-70s.  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 of 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

ISBN 978-1-959569-27-5 | Paperback with color photo insert | 6″ x 9″ | August 2025

Click here for the press kit.

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