Kate Chopin

Kate O'Flaherty was born in St. Louis in 1850, to an Irish father who was killed when she was five in the collapse of a railway bridge, and a mother from an old French family. She grew up among her mother, her grandmother and her great-grandmother, all widows. Married in 1870 to a cotton broker of New Orleans, she followed him to rural Louisiana and had six children. Widowed at thirty-two and in debt, she ran the store and the plantation herself, then returned to her native city in 1884. She began to publish around the age of forty, produced two collections of Louisiana stories, and died there in 1904.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelThe AwakeningKate Chopin · 1899Literature