© David G Spielman

Biography

Peter M. Wolf is an award-winning author. His recent memoir, My New Orleans, Gone Away, reached the New York Times e-book Best Seller list. Previous books such as Land in America, Hot Towns, and The Future of the City have been honored by The National Endowment for the Arts, The Ford Foundation, and The Graham Foundation. A fifth generation New Orleans native, Wolf is Leon Godchaux’s great-great grandson.

Schedule

11:15 am to 12:15 pm
State Capitol, House Committee Room 6
Highs, Lows, and In-Betweens: The South Louisiana Jewish Experience
with Brian J. Costello, Marlene Trestman, Peter Wolf, and moderator Marian D. Moore

12:30 pm to 1:15 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

The Sugar King: Leon Godchaux, A New Orleans Legend, His Creole Slave, and His Jewish Roots

"A remarkable, vivid, and meticulously researched story about an unjustly forgotten major figure of the nineteenth century." - Nicholas B. Lemann

"It's more than a bio. It's a way to understand Jewishness, the South, and America." - Walter Isaacson

"Peter Wolf's The Sugar King is an absorbing ancestral journey." - Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Peter M. Wolf unearths Southern Jewish history in a major new work, with a foreword by Calvin Trillin.

A penniless, illiterate, Jewish thirteen-year-old from France crosses the Atlantic alone. Landing in raucous and polyglot New Orleans in 1837, the third largest city in America, he starts out as a peddler of notions to plantations along the Mississippi. He remains unable to read or to write in English or in French his entire life. Nevertheless, by the end of his intrigue-filled life, Leon Godchaux is known as the "Sugar King of Louisiana," the owner of fourteen plantations, the largest sugar producer in the region and the top taxpayer in the state. He refuses to enter the sugar business until the end of slavery. Unsympathetic to the Lost Cause, caught up in the Civil War, and negotiating Reconstruction and Jim Crow, Godchaux simultaneously builds an esteemed New Orleans clothing empire.

Godchaux relies on the accomplishments of two Black men. Joachim Tassin, a slave whose birth status both men conceal, is entwined with Leon Godchaux in his clothing business, and Norbert Rillieux is a free man of color whose overlooked ingenious invention enables Godchaux to build his sugar empire.