Kate Chopin (Cyclopedia of World Authors)
Katherine O’Flaherty Chopin (SHO-pan) may well be the most important American female realist writer of the late nineteenth century, and in The Awakening she produced a masterpiece worthy of comparison with Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). Katherine O’Flaherty was the daughter of the wealthy Irish immigrant Thomas O’Flaherty and his second wife, Eliza Feris, a descendant of an old Creole family. When she was four years old, her father died in a railway accident; the event affected her deeply, and the account of a similar catastrophe plays a central role in...
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