Kate Chopin was born in St. Louis. She did not begin to write until she was thirty-six years old. Up to that time, her life gave no hint of either literary talent or literary ambition. Yet after the publication of her first stories in 1889, she enjoyed ten years of a productive, serious, and fairly successful career.
Her first novel, At Fault (1890), had difficulty finding a publisher, so she brought it out at her own expense and sent review copies to importan...