Kate Chopin (1851–1904), born Kate O'Flaherty, was raised in St. Louis. When she was four years old, her father died in a train wreck. She was brought up by her French-speaking Creole mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother, who was a fine storyteller. Until the age of seventeen, she attended a Catholic school called the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart. At eighteen, she met a twenty-five-year-old banker named Oscar Chopin, whom she married. The Chopins moved to New Orleans, her husband's hometown, and before she was thirty years old, Kate Chopin gave birth to six children. When her husband's cotton business failed, the couple moved to Cloutierville in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana.

Chopin's family physician in St. Louis recognized the quality of the writing in Chopin's letters from Louisiana and urged her to write as an outlet for her emotions. Many of the stories that Chopin was to write in later years dealt with the lives of the Creoles and Cajuns whom she came to know in Louisiana. When her husband suddenly died of swamp fever, Chopin moved back to St. Louis and began her literary career. She wrote two novels, over one hundred short stories, poetry, book reviews, and literary criticism, all while raising her six children. Chopin's second novel, The Awakening (1899), met with much censorship in its time but is today considered a masterpiece, having received renewed critical attention in the twentieth century because of its strong feminist message.