Kate Chopin
- Kate Chopin: Her Novels and Stories: Official WebsiteKate Chopin (1850–1904) is an American writer best known for her stories about the inner lives of sensitive, daring women. Her novel The Awakening and her short stories are read today in countries around the world, and she is widely recognized as one of America’s essential authors...
- Kate Chopin: BritannicaKate Chopin, née Katherine O’Flaherty, (born Feb. 8, 1851, St. Louis, Mo., U.S.—died Aug. 22, 1904, St. Louis), American novelist and short-story writer known as an interpreter of New Orleans culture. There was a revival of interest in Chopin in the late 20th century because her concerns about the freedom of women foreshadowed later feminist literary themes...
Research & Reference
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin: Primary Source Sets-Digital Public LibraryKate Chopin’s novel has been called a scandalous masterpiece. It shocked readers when it was published in 1899, but today it is recognized as an American classic. Born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Chopin moved to Louisiana when she married at age 20; like many of her other works, The Awakening portrays the Creole elite of Natchitoches parish. In the novel, “Creole” refers to people descended from French and Spanish colonists who settled in Louisiana before it became part of the United States. While Creole people could be white, mixed-race, or black, Creole society maintained a racial hierarchy that privileged light skin. Several of Chopin’s works criticize this hierarchy, yet The Awakening largely leaves it unexamined...
- Chopin, Kate: Credo ReferenceBorn in St. Louis, Missouri, Kate Chopin (born Katherine O’Flaherty) lost her father to a railroad accident when she was five years old. Raised in a wealthy household by her widowed mother (who never remarried), grandmother, and great-grandmother (both of them also widowed), Kate was well educated, graduating from the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart in 1868. Two years later she married Oscar Chopin, the son of a Louisiana cotton planter, and moved with him to New Orleans...
- Where to Get Started with Kate Chopin's Short Stories: NYP LibraryHappy birthday, Kate Chopin! The author of The Awakening (1899) and one of the first feminist novelists in America was born on this day in 1850 in St. Louis. While Chopin was largely unappreciated in her time—often degraded by critics for her choice to explore themes of female independence, sexuality, and empowerment—her writing was later recognized as being ahead of its time in the 20th century, and Chopin scholarship has expanded greatly since then. Most readers know her for the pre-modernist masterpiece The Awakening, which tells the story of Edna Pontellier, an unhappy wife and mother from New Orleans. But before she published that novel, Chopin was better known as a writer of short stories.If you're curious about where to start with Kate Chopin's short fiction—which is available at the Library in this collection—let us point you in the right direction...
Kate Chopin's Life
- Kate Chopin's LifeBorn Katherine O'Flaherty in 1850, Kate grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, in an all-female household after her father's death. In 1870 she married Oscar Chopin and enjoyed a happy marriage in Louisiana.
Kate Chopin
- Kate ChopinListen to an excerpt from "Desiree's Baby." Chopin is born in 1850 in Saint Louis. Her 1899 work "The Awakening," about a woman who committed suicide after an affair was banned in Saint Louis.
Author's Works & Perspectives
Kate Chopin: Complete Novels and Stories
From ruined Louisiana plantations to bustling, cosmopolitan New Orleans, Kate Chopin wrote with unflinching honesty about propriety and its strictures, the illusions of love and the realities of marriage, and the persistence of a past scarred by slavery and war. Her stories of fiercely independent women challenged contemporary mores as much by their sensuousness as their politics, and today seem decades ahead of their time. Now, The Library of America collects all of Chopin's novels and stories as never before in one authoritative volume. The explosive novelAt Fault(1890) centers on a love triangle between a strong-willed young widow, a stiff St. Louis businessman, and the man's alcoholic wife. In the two story collectionsBayou Folk(1894) andA Night in Acadie(1897), Chopin transforms the popular local color sketch into taut, perfectly calibrated tales that portray Louisiana bayou cultures with sympathetic insight and an eye to the unresolved conflicts of a South reeling from the Civil War. InThe Awakening(1899), the novel that scandalized many of her contemporaries and effectively ended her public career as a writer, Chopin tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a restless, unsatisfied woman who embarks on a quixotic search for fulfillment. Rendered with masterful precision, detachment, and a suggestive ambiguity that defies easy judgments about Edna's actions,The Awakeningis the novel that restored Chopin to literary prominence after its rediscovery by critics in the 1960s and 1970s. The volume also includes all the stories not collected by Chopin, including those meant forA Vocation and a Voice, a projected volume that her publisher canceled in 1900; stories that Chopin never tried to publish, such as the erotically daring "The Storm"; and "Ti Fr re," "A Horse Story," and "Alexandre's Wonderful Experience," three stories which were found in 1992 in a long-lost cache of Chopin's papers.
Kate Chopin
A biography of the author of "The Awakening" traces Chopin's life and career, portraying her as an unconventional and complex woman who lived by her own rules, and explores the ways in which her life and experiences influenced her writings
Kate Chopin: A study of the short fiction
Series Editors: Gary Scharnhorst, University of New Mexico and Eric Haralson, State University of New York, Stony Brook. This is the only series to provide in-depth critical introductions to major modern and contemporary short story writers worldwide. Each volume offers: a comprehensive overview of the artists short fiction-including detailed analyses of every significant story; interviews, essays, memoirs and other biographical materials -- often previously unpublished; a representative selection of critical responses; and a comprehensive primary bibliography, a selected bibliography of important criticism, a chronology of the artists life and works and an index.
Kate Chopin: The Joy That Kills
- Kate Chopin: The Joy That KillsThis is the widely heralded adaptation of the short story by Kate Chopin, the late-19th-century writer whose work is only now receiving the major recognition it deserves. The setting is Kate Chopin’s own world—the world of the upper-class Creole society that dominated New Orleans in the 1870s, a world with a strict code of behavior, one of whose strongest tenets required a wife to subordinate her will and her very being to her husband. Produced and directed by Tina Rathborne.