Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin was an American author of short stories and novels, born Katherine O'Flaherty on February 8, 1850, in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on August 22, 1904, of a brain hemorrhage following a visit to the St. Louis World's Fair. Of Irish and French Creole descent, she was educated at the Sacred Heart Academy and married Oscar Chopin, a New Orleans cotton broker, in 1870. The couple lived in New Orleans and Cloutierville, Louisiana, where she absorbed the Cajun and Creole cultures that filled her later fiction.

After Oscar's death from malaria in 1882 left her with six children and substantial debt, Chopin returned to St. Louis and began writing. Her short story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897) earned national attention for their evocations of Louisiana life, and individual stories such as "The Story of an Hour" and "Désirée's Baby" appeared in Vogue and other magazines.

Her novel The Awakening, published on April 22, 1899, by Herbert S. Stone of Chicago, traced the sexual and personal awakening of Edna Pontellier, a New Orleans matron, in language and themes that scandalized contemporary reviewers. The St. Louis Mercantile Library reportedly removed the book from its shelves, and Chopin's planned third collection was canceled. She wrote little fiction in her remaining five years.

Reassessment beginning in the 1950s and accelerated by Per Seyersted's 1969 biography established The Awakening as a foundational text of American feminist literature, and it is now widely taught in university courses.

The name Kate is a short form of Katherine, from the Greek Aikaterinē, traditionally linked to katharos meaning "pure." She bore it as a woman whose prose unsettled the propriety of her age.