Jan 6, 2010

The Story of an Hour | Author Biography

Kate Chopin was born in St. Louis in 1851. Her parents, Thomas and Eliza O'Flaherty, were wealthy, slave-owning Catholics who held a prominent position in their community. When Chopin was four, her father died in a train accident, and she was raised by her French-Creole mother and great-grandmother. At seventeen, she graduated from the Academy of the Sacred Heart. Two years later, in 1870, she married Oscar Chopin, a Louisiana businessman of French-Creole descent. In New Orleans, where she and her husband lived until 1879, Chopin was at the center of Southern aristocratic social life....