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Thursday, March 11, 2010

Kate Chopin (1851-1904)

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Google "Kate Chopin." Find one interesting fact about her and post it. Be sure your fact has not already been posted by someone else, or your post will be rejected. Also be sure to include your first name and the first initial of your last name so we know who posted what.

16 comments:

  1. Kate's grandmother died three days before Christmas in 1863; Kate's half-brother, George, died in the war of typhoid fever on Mardi Gras Day; her father had died on All Saints day. All these unhappy incidents created a strong skepticism towards religion in Chopin.

    Anna P.

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  2. American author Kate Chopin (1850–1904) wrote two novels and about a hundred short stories in the 1890s. Most of her fiction is set in Louisiana and most of her best-known work focuses on the lives of sensitive, intelligent women.

    Her short stories were well received in her own time and were published by some of America's most prestigious magazines, including Vogue and the Atlantic Monthly. Her early novel At Fault (1890) was not much noticed by the public, but The Awakening (1899) was widely condemned. Critics called it morbid, vulgar, and disagreeable.
    Tania G.

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  3. The Awakening is the story of a woman who is married with children, who experiences a sexual awakening in relationship with another man. When the novel was published (1899) the idea of adultery was scandalous -- but the idea of a woman having pleasure during sex was intolerable. Kate Chopin was scandalized in the press, her writings were ignored, and she never wrote again.

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  4. "Kate Chopin grew up during the Civil War and this caused her to be separated from the one friend she had made at the Sacred Heart Academy, Kitty Garesche. Her family were slave holders and supported the South. St. Louis was a pro-North city, and the Gareshe's were forced to move." But when the war ended they moved back, and she was able to see her friend again. Threw the years this was the only female friend that Kate Chopin was known to have had!

    Heidy L.

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  5. Kate Chopin died of a brain hemorrhage after a strenuous day at the St. Louis World's Fair, where she had been a regular visitor. She was remembered only as one of the southern local colorists of the 1890s until The Awakening was rediscovered in the 1970s as an early masterpiece of American realism and a superb rendering of female experience.

    Jan B.

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  6. Chopin's novels were mostly forgotten after her death in 1904, but in the 1920s her short stories began to appear in anthologies, and slowly people again came to read her. In the 1930s a Chopin biography appeared which spoke well of her short fiction but dismissed The Awakening as unfortunate. However, by the 1950s scholars and others recognized that the novel is an insightful and moving work of fiction. Such readers set in motion a Kate Chopin revival, one of the more remarkable literary revivals in the United States.

    Kristian M.L

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  7. Kate Chopin was born in February 8,1850 in St.Louis,Missouri, and came from an Irish and French descent.At a young age Kate Chopin lost her father,and few years later she lost her brothers and sisters.When she reached the age of 24, she was an only child.
    Chopin's first work was called,"Lilia's Polka" which was written specially for her daughter.However, it wasn't until 1889, when she began her writing career as a professional writer.Some of her famous works were the poem: "If it might be" and the short story "Desireer's Baby" and many more.Also,"Her very first short story, "A Point at Issue!", was accepted and printed in the Post-Dispatch on October 27th, 1899."
    -Gabriela Portilla-

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  8. From 1869 to 1902, she wrote short stories for both children and adults which were published in such magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, the Century, and Harper's Youth's Companion. Her major works were two short story collections, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897).
    -Alexandra G

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  9. in 1870, when she was twenty years old,she got married to Oscar Chopin,he was french Catholic as was Kate.They had five boys and two girls. Oscar died of swamp fever in 1882, and 1884 she moved to St Louis to lived with her mother Eliza, but she died the next year.

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  10. As a writer, Kate Chopin wrote very rapidly and without much revision. She usually worked in her home surrounded by her children. The content and message of The Awakening caused an uproar and Chopin was denied admission into the St. Louis Fine Art Club based on its publication. She was terribly hurt by the reaction to the book and in the remaining five years of her life she wrote only a few short stories, and only a small number of those were published.

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  11. n 1884 she sold up and moved back to St. Louis to live with her mother. Sadly, Eliza died the next year, leaving Kate alone with her children again. To support herself and her young family, she began to write. She was immediately successful and wrote short stories about people she had known in Louisiana. The Awakening was inspired by a true story of a New Orleans woman who was infamous in the French Quarter.
    Kwaku B.

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  12. Some modern scholars have written that the novel The Awakening was banned at Chopin’s hometown library in S. Louis, but this claim has not been able to be verified, although in 1902, the Evanston, Illinois, Public Library removed The Awakening from its open shelves. Chopin’s third collection of stories, to have been called A Vocation and a Voice, was for unknown reasons cancelled by the publisher and did not appear as a separate volume until 1991.

    Farrah E

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  13. kristina.martin@ymail.comMarch 22, 2010 at 12:24 AM

    While reading about Kate Chopin i learned about many interesting things about her work. However i thought the most amazing fact was that Kate Chopin raised six children by herself while dealing with her late husbands debt. It take a remarkable woman to be able to juggle the responsibilities of 6 children and dealing with debt of another person.

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  14. Before marriage in 1870, to Oscar Chopin, Kate Chopin's maiden name was Kate O'Flaherty. Also her father, Thomas O'Flaherty was a successful business man, but he died in 1855, when Kate was five and a half. The cause of his death was a train that he was a passanger on went across a bridge that collapsed while the train crossed. After her father's death she became avid reader of fairy tales, poetry, and religous allegories.

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  15. in 1870, at the age of twenty, she married Oscar Chopin, twenty-five, and the son of a wealthy cotton-growing family in Louisiana. He was French catholic in background, just like Kate. What her husband amdired most about Kate Chopin was her Independence and intelligence.

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  16. "She was the third of five children, but her sisters died in infancy and her brothers (from her father's first marriage) in their early twenties. She was the only child to live past the age of twenty-five."

    http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng384/katebio.htm

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