Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin (1850–1904) was born Katherine O’Flaherty in St. Louis and lived after her marriage in New Orleans and in rural Louisiana, the settings of most of her fiction. Widowed at thirty-two with six children, she returned to St. Louis and began to write: the story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), and the novel The Awakening (1899), whose hostile reception effectively ended her career. She was rediscovered in the 1960s.