Kate Chopin – 1851-1904

Chopin wrote about what she knew best: the colorful people in and around New Orleans in the late 1800s, but she is best remembered today for her 1899 novel The Awakening, a story about the sexual awakening of a young wife and mother, who seeks to escape stifling social convention by abandoning her husband and children. Condemned in its own time, it was rediscovered in the 1950s and is considered a precursor of modern feminist literature.