Alice Dunbar Nelson’s early short stories about New Orleans’s downriver, working-class neighborhoods focus, in particular, on the way the men in this environment can suffer forms of alienation sufficiently extreme to constitute social death. In two of these stories, a literal death comes to highlight the ways the main characters are already, from the standpoint of social relations, dead, and as such highlight the problems faced by the working poor in the distinctive environment of the final years of the nineteenth century in New Orleans. These stories, however, gave Dunbar Nelson a means of escaping this world, as, soon after they were published, she left for New York and became a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance.