New Orleans—birthplace of the cocktail, capital of disinhibition, the town where time is forgotten—once beckoned Julia Reed, who never looked back. Who would? It's the place where you can live experientially twice as long as anywhere else. plus: A staggering tour of 38 great bars in the Big Easy

In 1942, a man named Robert Kinney wrote a charming little book called The Bachelor in New Orleans. Billed as "a handbook for unattached gentlemen and ladies of spirit visiting or resident in the Paris of America," it was apparently meant as a (slightly) tongue-in-cheek response to the more serious guidebooks produced by the W.P.A. Federal Writers' Project. It also turned out to be remarkably informative—even today—and raised an important metaphysical question. "Few bachelors," according to Kinney, "really know whether New Orleans is an alcoholic mirage or whether New Orleans drinks are part of a general illusion, including wrought iron grillwork, impossibly beautiful women, magnolia blossoms, race horses, carnival parades and Mardi Gras, moonlight, and the suggestive music seeping out into the streets from a hundred courtyards. When—if ever—you leave New Orleans for that place you used to call home... you only know it was swell, whether it was the drinks that created the city or the city that created the drinks."

It is easy to see how such a conundrum might arise. A great many people, after all, come to New Orleans in order to lose their cares or themselves, overimbibe and overindulge, and generally revel in a lost weekend—albeit one a tad more lusty and uplifting than that of Ray Milland—so that when they wake up, still hung over, back home in High Point, say, or Akron, they are inevitably confused about the solidity of what they experienced.

Part of the problem is that there is very little in New Orleans that is actually solid. The city is located just above the Gulf of Mexico, between a famously unruly river and a forty-mile-wide lake, on land that is not quite land and which is invariably referred to as either pudding or gumbo (a nod to the latter's dark and viscous roux). The ground literally shifts under your feet and is currently sinking at a rate of about a third of an inch per year. Also, even without the benefit of what Kinney calls the "wondrous drinks" constantly on offer, a variety of factors conspire to make the place feel more than just a little mirage-like.

The light is often murky, the air can feel like water, and the water table itself is so high that bodies are buried aboveground (and are everywhere visible in gleaming white mini-cities of the dead). All manner of insects, from mosquitoes to flying Formosan termites, swarm in great clouds; tropical lushness spills out from behind courtyard walls and through wrought iron fences; naked women (and men) spill out onto the stage of Bourbon Street. (Walker Percy once wrote that "the tourist is apt to see more nuns and naked women than he ever saw before"—a typically jarring juxtaposition that understandably might be passed off as yet another optical illusion.)

In such an unsteady environment, one could certainly be driven to "create" a few drinks. In fact, though it is a subject of much debate, the cocktail itself is said to have been invented here, by a pharmacist named Antoine Peychaud who had escaped a slave revolt in his native Santo Domingo with a family recipe for bitters in hand. In 1838, he opened an apothecary shop on Royal Street, where, after hours, he offered friends a mixture of brandy and bitters in an egg cup (hence the theory that a cocktail is a badly pronounced coquetier). Thus was born the precursor to the Sazerac, a cocktail now made with American rye whiskey (a substitute for cognac after an attack of the deadly grapevine pest phylloxera made that spirit hard to get), absinthe (which was replaced by Herbsaint or Pernod when it was outlawed in 1912), and bitters (Peychaud's remains the only brand used for a true Sazerac).