Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin is a fiction author best known for her debut novel “The Awakening” and several short stories. She was born in St. Louis in 1850 to a French Creole mother and an immigrant Irish father. Her father was part of the elite in the city and was of middle-class extraction. The family had a tradition of living together in the same house and Kate remembers that as a child she had four generations of women in the same house. Growing up, she was very close to Madame Charleville her maternal great grandmother that was the person that introduced her to storytelling. From her grandmother, she heard risqué and elaborate stories told in the French language a Madame Charleville did not speak a word of English. While she had lost her father to an industrial accident while very young, family tragedy continued to dog her life. As an eleven-year-old, she lost her grandmother, and her brother George also died fighting for the Confederates in the Civil War. But she never despaired and she became known as the “Littlest Rebel,” when her reputation as the girl that tore down the Union flag spread around her hometown and made her legend.