Charles Whitfield Richards: The Artist and His Circle

CHARLES WHITFIELD RICHARDS: THE ARTIST AND HIS CIRCLE is the first book-length biography of this artist and journalist, tracing his journey from the Mississippi Delta to Jazz-Age Paris to modern New Orleans.

Richards was born in a Mississippi Delta boom town in 1906, where he grew up on his family’s 80-acre farm. Not long after his father’s tragic death in 1917, Richards and his mother moved to Memphis where, at the age of 15, he became a journalist.

But the tragedies in his life forced Richards into an itinerant lifestyle. He ran off with a circus, joined the merchant marines, studied art in Kansas City, Paris and New York, and found work as a reporter at newspapers throughout the South. His insightful interviews of prominent personalities, illustrated by his own hand, earned enduring fans. But job anxieties forced Richards to leave newspaper work in 1945 and turn full time to portraiture and landscape painting, while maintaining New Orleans as his hub. Recognized as a genuine French Quarter character, Richards had a lasting influence on New Orleans art, and on notable figures in the city’s culture: Noel Rockmore, Roark Bradford, Bertha Rolfe, Morris Henry Hobbs, Larry Borenstein, Enrique Alferez and others.

CHARLES WHITFIELD RICHARDS: THE ARTIST AND HIS CIRCLE was named Finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom Awards for Non-Fiction Book.