As incoming University students tour the Quad, tour guides often point out landmarks that are recognizable in the 2012 movie “Pitch Perfect,” but campus landmarks have shaped more than the background of a popular
movie. 
Campus locations like Tiger Stadium, Middleton Library, Allen Hall and Chimes Street have played a part in the written works of LSU authors, including Robert Penn Warren, Jean Stafford and Jon Ed Bradley, according to a University news
release.   
English instructor Nolde Alexius and her English 2025 class are developing a literary history tour. The tour will highlight the offices, hang-out spots and landmarks that shaped novels, poems, essays and short stories written by University authors, the release
said.
Students in Alexius’ class studied the lives and work of LSU authors and presented their ideas for a literary tour of campus to the class as their final project last semester.
Alexius said in the release the tours are not yet a reality. She is reaching out to colleagues to include information about playwrights, screenwriters and poets.
The tour will include information about writers like Bradley, whose novel, “It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium,” discusses his time on the LSU football
team.
Warren also began writing “All the King’s Men,” while he was an English professor at the University. 
According to the release, the tour will touch on The Southern Review, a literary quarterly Time magazine called “superior to any other journal in the English language.” 
The magazine began at the University in 1935 when then-LSU President James Smith asked Warren and another friend to create a magazine, according to its website. 
Rebecca Wells, author of “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood,” who studied theatre, English and psychology at the University, and David Madden will have a place on the tour. Madden founded the University’s undergraduate creative writing program. 
The development of the literary campus tour coincides with the 30th anniversary of the University’s’ master of fine arts creative writing program, one of about nine in the Southeastern
Conference. 
The program was founded in the 1984-1985 school year, and it is now ranked third in the nation by Poets and Writers magazine, according to the English department website. Laura Mullen is taking over as director of the program this
year. 
The M.F.A. creative writing program only accepts eight writers each year. Each applicant must submit written prose or poetry which receives the highest consideration in the
process.