Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening.   Kate Chopin initially made her literary name as a writer of “local color fiction.” Writers around the United States were focusing careful attention on the customs, dialects, folkways, and geography of distinct regions in the U.S. For example, Sarah Orne Jewett focused on life in coastal Maine, perhaps most famously in The Country of the Pointed Firs, and her literary heir, Willa Cather, took the local color impulse further in her fully realized novels, such as My Antonia, O Pioneers!, and The Song of the Lark.   Chopin was particularly adept at crafting local color fiction, and she published two volumes of sketches and short stories set in the Cajun bayous of Louisiana. Though she was born and raised in my hometown of St. Louis and though she would return to the Lou after her husband died, she lived with her husband first in New Orleans, then in a rural Louisiana parish. It was there in Cloutierville in Nachitoches Parish that she found the inspirat