The literary history of Royal Street in New Orleans begins with the folktales of the flatboatmen, the songs of the enslaved trafficked through the city, and the Afro-Creole poets of the 1840s–1860s. It then continues in the late nineteenth century with major, national voices on the subject of the city (Cable, Hearn, King, Davis), and the arrival of O. Henry at the turn of the century. It then flowered again in the 1920s with the bohemian circle around Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, with the emergence of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams in the 1940s, and then yet again with the various 1960s undergrounds of John Rechy, Robert Stone, The Outsider Magazine, and organized crime figures implicated in the Kennedy assassination. There then followed in the 1970s and 80s a series of important books rooted in a mythological vision of the area by Ishmael Reed, Tom Robbins, Anne Rice, Harry Crews, Dalt Wonk, and Paula Fox. The neighborhood’s most recent literary masterpiece appeared in 2003 in Valerie Martin’s Property. Much of the major writing of this neighborhood shares an interest in masks – identities concealed, divided, fabricated, transformed, or sustained against the odds in both stories and story-telling.

The Kennedy assassination traumatized a nation, and the official investigation conducted by the Warren Commission (1963–64) contained discrepancies that invited conspiratorial speculation. Subsequent investigations by the Church Committee (1975–76) and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976–79) raised questions regarding the covert activities of the CIA, particularly the enlistment of the Mafia to assassinate Castro, which reframed the entire Kennedy assassination. Skepticism regarding the findings of the Warren Commission and revelations from the Church Committee fueled a cultural paranoia that pervades the work of Don DeLillo, particularly in a run of novels from Players (1977) and Running Dog (1978) through The Names (1982) and Libra (1988). Deeply indebted to the findings of these three flawed investigations, DeLillo’s fictionalization of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, Libra, mines this paranoia, but also contextualizes the JFK assassination within an American social totality marked by contradictions and antagonisms. By exploring historical trauma in a way that calls into question official history, Libra represents an exemplary work of what Linda Hutcheon calls historiographic metafiction.