[3] Most of its titles relate to Louisiana and Southern culture, cuisine, art, travel guides, history, children's books, and textbooks.
Its roots were in the Pelican Bookshop on Royal Street, a hangout for New Orleans' literary circle of the time, which included Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Caroline Durieux, Grace King, and Lyle Saxon.
[4] Its first release was Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles: A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans, a book of illustrations by William Spratling with captions and a foreword by Faulkner.
[8][9] Landry, who was born on his father's Alma plantation near Thibodaux, worked in advertising and was a founding board member of the Metairie Park Country Day School.
[10] Landry was anti-New Deal and a racial conservative, and under him, Pelican published many books advocating white supremacist and segregationist positions, including his own The Cult of Equality: A Study of the Race Problem (1945), The Battle of Liberty Place: The Overthrow of Carpet-bag Rule in New Orleans, September 14, 1874 (1955) (a defense of the White League and the Ku Klux Klan), and Rebuilding the Tower of Babel: A Study of Christianity and Segregation (1957).
[16] Historian Lawrence N. Powell described Landry's Battle of Liberty Place as "propaganda, using history to defend segregation and a racial status quo.
In 1970, Carter sold Pelican to brothers Milburn and James L. Calhoun, natives of West Monroe in north Louisiana.
[20] The brothers were, like Landry, conservative; among the first books issued under their ownership was The Real Spiro Agnew: Commonsense Quotations of a Household Word, edited by James Calhoun.