New Orleans' Fictional Citizens: From Ignatius Reilly to Princess Tiana

The New Orleans Woman Who Inspired a Disney Princess

Leah Chase already has her own post in this collection, but the fictional character she inspired deserves a mention of her own. Princess Tiana from Disney's The Princess and the Frog is the only Disney princess from New Orleans, and her story—a hardworking young woman who dreams of opening her own restaurant in the city—is as New Orleans as it gets.

But this post isn't about Tiana. It's about the fictional characters that New Orleans has given the world, because the city's contribution to the American imagination goes far beyond the real people who've lived here. Ignatius J. Reilly, the flatulent medievalist from A Confederacy of Dunces, stands in bronze on Canal Street. Louis de Pointe du Lac, the vampire who narrated Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, made the Garden District synonymous with gothic romance. Benjamin Button aged backward in a mansion on St. Charles Avenue.

These characters endure because New Orleans is the kind of city that generates fiction as naturally as it generates music. The streets are theatrical. The architecture is dramatic. The history is so strange that you couldn't make it up if you tried—but people keep making things up anyway, because the city is an inexhaustible source of stories.

Tiana was a breakthrough: the first Black Disney princess, set in 1920s New Orleans, dreaming of a restaurant that would make her father proud. The film got plenty of things right about the city—the music, the food, the architecture, the voodoo, the swamps—and if it simplified the racial realities of 1920s Louisiana, well, it was a children's movie. The point was the dream, and the dream was pure New Orleans: work hard, cook well, feed people, build something that lasts.

The fact that New Orleans is home to an entire population of famous fictional characters—vampires, detectives, medieval scholars, Disney princesses, and whatever Benjamin Sisko will become at Deep Space Nine—tells you something about the city's hold on the American imagination. New Orleans isn't just a place. It's a setting, in the literary sense—a place so vivid that storytellers keep coming back to it because no other American city provides the same raw material for fiction.