Kate Chopin

American · 1850 to 1904

Born Katherine O'Flaherty on February 8, 1850, in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of an Irish-born businessman from Galway and a Louisiana Creole mother of French descent, she lost her father at five in a railway accident and was raised in a household of widows: her great-grandmother, who tutored her in French and music and the need to look on life without fear, her grandmother, and her mother. She attended Sacred Heart Academy and graduated in 1868. In June 1870 she married the New Orleans cotton broker Oscar Chopin and bore six children between 1871 and 1879. When Oscar's brokerage failed, the family moved to Cloutierville in north-central Louisiana, where she absorbed the Creole culture that would furnish her stories. He died of malaria in 1882, leaving her forty-two thousand dollars in debt, and she returned to St. Louis at her mother's urging. She began writing for publication in 1889, encouraged by a doctor friend, and her stories began to appear in the Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, and Century, collected in Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). "Désirée's Baby" and "The Story of an Hour" earned her a national readership. The Awakening, published in April 1899, told the story of Edna Pontellier's sexual and spiritual unfolding at Grand Isle and her decision to walk into the Gulf rather than return to her life as wife and mother. The book was condemned as morbid, vulgar, and unwholesome, and her career did not recover. She wrote little in the years that followed. She collapsed at the St. Louis World's Fair from a cerebral haemorrhage and died two days later on August 22, 1904, aged fifty-four.