Best known for her novel The Awakening, Kate Chopin (1851-1904) established her literary reputation with short stories about life in rural Louisiana during the late nine-teenth century. After her 1870 marriage to Oscar Chopin, a Creole cotton trader and commission merchant, she lived in and around New Orleans for more than a decade until her husband's death in 1882. During these years, Chopin became acquainted with Creoles, Cajuns, and newly freed blacks. When Oscar Chopin died he was nearly bankrupt, forcing Kate and their six children to return to her family in St. Louis. Still under the spell of New Orleans, Chopin began writing and her short stories about Creole and Cajun life first appeared in magazines in 1889. The stories collected in Bayou Folk (1894) present remarkably vivid snapshots of daily life in a now vanished world. Many of them highlight the relations between blacks and whites in a society where the rules of engagement still reflected the entrenched patterns of slavery some two decades after the Civil War. Chopin's gifts for capturing the dialects of the region and for telling a compelling story in memorable vignettes provide the reader with a richly rewarding experience.
