Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin (1850–1904) was an American writer, born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis to an Irish father and a French Creole mother. She married a Louisiana cotton factor, Oscar Chopin, and bore six children before his death in 1882 left her a widow at thirty-two. Back in St. Louis she began to write, and her stories of Creole and Acadian Louisiana, collected in Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie, were widely admired. The Awakening (1899), about a wife and mother who refuses her role, was condemned as morbid, and she published little afterward. She died after a day at the St. Louis World's Fair.