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

by Peter M. Wolf, Calvin Trillin (Foreword by)

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781669829294
Publisher:	Xlibris US
Publication date:	09/08/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	478
Sales rank:	545,571
File size:	28 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

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 Th e National Endowment for the Arts, Th e Ford Foundation and The Graham Foundation.

Wolf was educated at Metairie Park Country Day School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Yale, Tulane, and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. His research has taken him to Paris as a Fulbright scholar and to Rome as a visiting artist/scholar at the American Academy in Rome.

In New Orleans Wolf serves on the advisory board of the Tulane University School of Architecture, and as a trustee of the Louisiana Landmarks Society. In East Hampton he is a trustee of Guild Hall and the Village Preservation Society.

Wolf, a fifth generation New Orleans native, is Leon Godchaux’s great-great grandson.