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Kate Chopin, "The Story of an Hour"

BIOGRAPHY

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[From The Norton Introduction to Literature]

(1850–1904)

Katherine O'Flaherty was born in St.Louis, Missouri, to a Creole-Irish family that enjoyed a high place in society. Her father died when she was four, and Kate was raised by her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. Very well read at a young age, she received her formal education at the St.Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart.In 1870, she married Oscar Chopin, a Louisiana businessman, and lived with him in Natchitoches parish and New Orleans, where she became a close observer of Creole and Cajun life.Following her husband's sudden death in 1884, she returned to St.Louis, where she raised her six children and began her literary career. In slightly more than a decade she produced a substantial body of work, including the story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897) and the classic novel The Awakening (1899), which was greeted with a storm of criticism for its frank treatment of female sexuality.

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