Kate Chopin

Born into a French Creole family in St. Louis, Chopin married a Louisiana cotton factor and spent over a decade in New Orleans and rural Natchitoches Parish, absorbing the Creole and Cajun communities that fill her early fiction. Widowed at thirty-two with six children after her husband's sudden death, she briefly ran his general store and plantation before returning to St. Louis.

A family friend, a doctor, reportedly urged her into writing as an outlet after her mother's death soon followed her husband's; she built a career on well-received local-color stories collected in Bayou Folk before The Awakening upended it. Edna Pontellier's adultery and suicide struck reviewers as immoral, the book was pulled from some library shelves, and Chopin wrote almost nothing more before her death.

She died in 1904 of a brain hemorrhage, days after attending the St. Louis World's Fair, decades before The Awakening was rediscovered as a founding text of American feminist fiction.