In a career that lasted little more than a decade, Kate Chopin became well-known for stories set in the Creole and Acadian regions of Louisiana, but her masterwork, The Awakening (1899), told the daring story of a woman who defied social and sexual conventions, eliciting negative reviews that denied Chopin prominence until the middle of the twentieth century. Kate Chopin: A Literary Life sets the author in the context of nineteenth-century American women writers to show how standards of literary propriety affected the career of a major American writer.

NANCY WALKER is Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee.