The Levee

A riveting first novel, this jambalaya of human passion and deceit is set in the New Orleans of l953. The story of one man's attempt to change a culture rooted in generations of Southern white supremacy, it is a saga of the Old and the New South, of love and betrayal, terror and escape. Fletcher and Ursula Christian are glamorous leaders of New Orleans Society. Asked to develop a pilot program to admit Negro students, Fletcher, a department chair at prestigious Lemoigne University, accepts the challenge. He hires the wife of a new faculty member to assist him. When Fletcher's program is headlined after a press conference, his aristocratic Southern wife is outraged and secretly mobilizes powerful political and social forces to block Fletcher's attempt to integrate. Through a jasmine-heavy summer into the flame-filled fall, Fletcher and Ursula pursue conflicting goals until a series of devastating events brings them into a final confrontation, a confrontation between the future and the past, between two players at odds in a rich and deep culture.

Jennifer Sullivan Buchwald-Baerwald is Professor of Physiology Emeritus, UCLA School of Medicine and former Associate Director, UCLA Brain Research Institute. She has published extensively in Science, Nature, Brain Research, Neuroscience Research, Journal of Neurophysiology, Annual Review of Physiology, Experimental Neurology, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, American Journal of Physiology, Brain Research Bulletin. Sullivan spent several years in and around New Orleans as a graduate student, an experience that provided background and awareness for writing The Levee. Her fiction was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and won the California Writers’ Award in 2010. The Levee is her first novel.