Kate Chopin (1851-1904) was born in St. Louis to an Irish immigrant and a French-Creole mother. Following her husband's death in 1882, she returned to St. Louis to bring up their six children and began to compose and publish sketches. She is best known for her later novel of sexual passion, THE AWAKENING.

In the decade prior to the publication of her landmark novel, THE AWAKENING (1899), Kate Chopin wrote about ninety short stories, a selection of which appeared in BAYOU FOLK (1894) and A NIGHT IN ACADIE (1897). Chopin was deeply influenced by thework of the French and American realists and her portraits of the inhabitants of nineteenth-century New Orleans and Natchitoches Parish offer one of the most compassionate views of life in American realistic fiction. With a gentle and knowing gaze, Chopin evoked the distant world of Louisiana plantations and 'Cadian balls and describes the thoroughly modern complexities of her characters ethnic, gender and sexual identities.