Writer and public-sector folklorist. Though born in Bellingham, Washington, Saxon grew
up in Baton Rouge and was greatly attached to Louisiana as a place. Though he lived in
New York for several years, he spent most of his adult life in New Orleans and in the
Cane River country near Natchitoches.
Saxon worked as a journalist for much of his life and used his columns to promote
restoration of the French Quarter and to encourage people to wear elaborate costumes for
Mardi Gras. Though his desire was to write fiction, he became famous as a popular
historian of Louisiana with such books as Fabulous New Orleans (1928), Old Louisiana
(1929), and a biography of pirate Jean Lafitte, which was made into a movie by Cecil
B.De Mille.
Though he included folklore in his books, it was primarily because he was recognized
as an interpreter of Louisiana that he was asked in 1935 to head the Federal Writers’
Project in the state. This project was part of the Works Progress Administration and had
as its purpose providing employment for white collar workers during the Depression,
who would undertake useful research and writing. Collecting folklore was a central
undertaking. Saxon supervised this collecting, which resulted in Gumbo Ya-Ya: A
Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales (1945), the book he coedited with Edward Dryer and
Robert Tallant, and which stands as an end result of early government-sponsored folklore
research.
Saxon’s view of folklore was not sophisticated, and Gumbo Ya-Ya, though very
readable and containing much information on Louisiana folklore, is primarily journalistic
and limited in scope.
Frank de Caro
References
De Caro, F.A. 1985. A History of Folklife Research in Louisiana. In Louisiana Folklife: A Guide to
the State, ed. Nicholas R.Spitzer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana Folklife Program and Center for Gulf
South History and Culture, pp. 11–34.
Harvey, Cathy Chance. 1980. Lyle Saxon: A Portrait in Letters, 1917–1945. Ph.D. diss., Tulane
University.