The Awakening and Selected Stories

Kate Chopin was born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 8, 1851. Although she was brought up in a wealthy and socially elite Catholic family, Chopin's childhood was marred by tragedies. Her father was killed in a train accident when Chopin was just four years old, and in the following years she also lost her older brother, great-grandmother, and half-brother. In 1870, at the age of 19, she married Oscar Chopin, the son of a wealthy cotton-growing family in Louisiana. The couple had seven children together, five boys and two girls, before Oscar died of swamp fever in 1883. The following year, Chopin packed up her family and moved back to St. Louis to be with her mother, who died just a year later. To support herself and her family, Chopin started to write. Her first novel, At Fault, was published in 1890. Her most famous work, The Awakening, inspired by a real-life New Orleans woman who committed adultery, was published in 1899. The book explores the social and psychological consequences of a woman caught in an unhappy marriage in 19th century America, is now considered a classic of the feminist movement and caused such an uproar in the community that Chopin almost entirely gave up writing. Chopin did try her hand at a few short stories, most of which were not even published. Chopin died on August 22, 1904, of a brain hemorrhage, after collapsing at the World's Fair just two days before. Nina Baym was born Nina Zippin in Princeton, New Jersey on June 14, 1936. She received a bachelor's degree from Cornell University, a master's degree from Radcliffe College, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She joined the faculty of the University of Illinois-Champaign in 1963 and taught English there until her retirement in 2004. She wrote several books including Shape of Hawthorne's Career; The Scarlet Letter: A Reading; Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870; Women Writers of the American West, 1832-1927; and Feminism and American Literary History. She also served as general editor of several editions of The Norton Anthology of American Literature. She died from complications of dementia on June 15, 2018 at the age of 82. Kaye Gibbons was born on May 5, 1960 in Nash County, North Carolina. She received a bachelor's degree in American literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first novel, Ellen Foster, was published in 1987. It won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was chosen as one of Oprah's Book Club Selections, and was adapted into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie. Her other novels include The Virtuous Woman, A Cure for Dreams, Sights Unseen, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, Divining Women, The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster, The Lunatics' Ball, and The Secret Devotions of Mary Magdalen. Her novel Charms for the Easy Life was also adapted into a made-for-television movie. She also received the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, which recognized her contribution to French Literature in 1996 and she received the North Carolina Award for Literature in 1998.