NEWS RELEASE

JEFFERSON PARISH, LOUISIANA

May 11, 2023
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

HISTORIAN MIKI PFEFFER DISCUSSES THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AUTHOR GRACE KING AT EAST BANK REGIONAL LIBRARY 

JEFFERSON, LA – Miki Pfeffer, Visiting Scholar of History at Nichols State University in Thibodeaux, will discuss the life and times of author Grace King, at 7 p.m., Thursday, July 13, at the East Bank Regional Library, 4747 W. Napoleon Ave., Metairie. She is the author of A New Orleans Author in Mark Twain's Court: Letters from Grace King's New England Sojourns, published by LSU Press in 2019.

This event is free of charge and is open to the public. 

Grace Elizabeth King was born on Nov. 29, 1851 in New Orleans, and died on Jan. 14, 1932, also in New Orleans. The eldest of four girls in a family of eight children, she was raised in the French-speaking Creole society of New Orleans by her Protestant mother and Confederate lawyer father. King's early life was formed by her family’s antebellum life and Reconstruction.

From 1893 to 1898, King turned her attention to writing historical works about the territory and state of Louisiana, following the example of Charles Gayarré, a Southern historian and family friend. Jean Baptiste le Moyne (1892) is a biography of the Canadian founder of Mobile and New Orleans. With H. R. Ficklen, a Tulane University professor, she wrote A History of Louisiana (1893), primarily a school text. New Orleans: The Place and the People (1895), a model municipal history, is her best-known historical work.

King wrote few stories and articles and only two novels in the last 20 years of her life. The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard (1916) is an autobiographical work dealing with the economic struggle and humiliation of the Reconstruction period. La Dame de Sainte Hermine (1924) is a historical romance set in 18th-century New Orleans. Creole Families of New Orleans (1921), is based on the lives of French and Spanish families who contributed to the development of the city's culture in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Miki Pfeffer is a native of New Orleans. In her Eudora-Welty-Prize-winning study Southern Ladies and Suffragists: Julia Ward Right and Women's Rights at the 1884 New Orleans World's Fair, she examines issues of gender and power as they played out at the 1884 New Orleans World's Fair, where women from around the country gathered, including some of the leaders of the suffrage movement. She is also the

For more information regarding this event, contact Chris Smith, Manager of Adult Programming for the library, at 504-889-8143 or wcsmith@jefferson.lib.la.us.

The Jefferson Parish Library system consists of 16 locations that stretch from the Lakeshore Branch on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain to the Grand Isle Branch just steps away from the Gulf of Mexico. The library system consists of two large regional libraries and seven branches on each side of the Mississippi River. The East Bank Regional Library (4747 West Napoleon Ave., Metairie) serves as library headquarters. The Jefferson Parish Library is the second largest system in the state of Louisiana. More than 200 employees work for the Jefferson Parish Library including librarians, administration and support staff. For more information, contact the library at (504) 838-1100 or www.jefferson.lib.la.us. 

For more information about Jefferson Parish, visit www.JeffParish.net Residents can also receive regular updates by following the Parish on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (@JeffParishGov) or by texting JPALERT or JPNOTICIAS to 888-777.

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Jefferson Parish Public Information Office 1221 Elmwood Park Boulevard, Suite 1002 Jefferson, LA 70123

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Gretchen Hirt Gendron, PIO