With Hawks and Angels

Joel Lafayette Fletcher III served as an officer in the US Navy and lived abroad for a dozen years. He co-owned a language school in Florence, Italy, and worked in the field of educational exchange in Paris and London. For the past forty-plus years, he has been an art dealer specializing in American and European art of the twentieth century.

I wish this book was written twenty years ago so my younger self could see what someone from Lafayette could offer the wide world. For Fletcher, it was all beautiful and magical. . . . This book will make you wonder about your most authentic self and beckon it to come out amongst the hawks and angels.--Toby LeBlanc "Southern Review of Books" Joel Fletcher's memoir contains artists and actors and eccentric people of many kinds, and almost all of them have made the world a better place. This is a grand book, not only for its expansiveness, but for its appreciation of differences in people, whether in Paris or New Orleans. If you love the arts, if you love people, you'll love this book.--James Lee Burke, Guggenheim Fellow and author of Every Cloak Rolled in Blood This is a charming and thoughtful narrative that pleases with its honesty and humor. For those of us old enough to remember the era in which it is set, it brings back poignant memories. For all readers it charts the course of a life marked by the desire to live fully and deeply.--from the foreword by Ann Brewster Dobie, author of Voices from Louisiana: Profiles of Contemporary Writers Joel Lafayette Fletcher III's memoir is a moving account of the emotional journey of a young, white southern boy battling the changing social currents of the last sixty years of the twentieth century.--Michael Wade, professor emeritus of history at Appalachian State University Rich and complex as gumbo, yet told with welcoming ease, the stories in With Hawks and Angels meander from the bayous of Louisiana to the hallowed halls of the Uffizi. In the end, we come to know a man who had the quiet bravery to defy the conventions of his southern roots to forge a life of his own, all while honoring the history that shaped him.--Cory MacLauchlin, author of Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of "A Confederacy of Dunces"