The highly autobiographical work is set in a dilapidated boarding house at 722 Toulouse Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans in the late 1930s. It focuses on a nameless, newly-transplanted, innocent, aspiring St. Louis writer who is struggling with his literary career, poverty, loneliness, homosexuality, and a cataract. He gradually becomes involved with the other residents, including Mrs. Wire, his demented, manipulative landlady; Nightingale, an older, predatory, tubercular artist who refuses to accept his condition; Jane, a New Rochelle society girl dying of leukemia; her sexually ambiguous, drug-addicted lover Tye, who works as a bouncer in a strip club; Mary Maud and Miss Carrie, two eccentric elderly women who are literally starving to death; and a gay photographer with a passion for orgies.
