Kate Chopin in New Orleans - by Rosary O'Neill Phd & Rory O'Neill Schmitt Phd (Paperback)

About the Book

"Over the fourteen years that Kate Chopin lives in New Orleans and rural Louisiana, she was besieged--strife, horror, exile, the death of her young husband, isolation as a single mother and bankruptcy. Despite it all, or perhaps in some ways due to it all, she became America's first great female novelist. Her time in Louisiana inspired more than one hundred short stories and both novels she wrote. Moral fiber kept her striving amid rejection and destitution, and at the age of forty, she began a writing career that left an indelible mark on our literary history."--Back cover.

Book Synopsis

Authors Rory O'Neill Schmitt and Rosary O'Neill share the NOLA life of Kate Chopin, the first great American woman novelist. In this epic story, Chopin becomes a Phoenix rising amidst the disgrace, death, and abandonment in the romantic desperate setting of post-Civil War Louisiana. This book, a follow up to Edgar Degas in New Orleans, presents Chopin, who lived in the same neighborhood as the Degas family during that time. Chopin celebrated in New Orleans' great homes and mansions up River Road with their wonderland of oaks, columns, balconies. She had lived in the Garden District, watched New Orleans trolleys with their big windows roll past the Gothic mansions and Greco-Roman houses on St. Charles Avenue, strolled languidly through Audubon Park with its oak tree wonderland full of swamps and lush Louisiana foliage.

Review Quotes

"I have followed Rory and Rosary's New Orleans history books on Degas and Voodoo, and I am intrigued by how they paint the heroine, Kate Chopin, in all her shocking and revealing detail. They are writers who don't shy from the real hard truths of life in New Orleans at difficult periods of time." -Mark Duplass, Actor, Writer, Producer

The tone of Kate Chopin in New Orleans captures a poetic charm and clever whimsy which informs the engaging narrative. Relating as New Orleanians to their subject, the authors embrace her as emblematic of the Crescent City, especially in Chopin's short stories' subject matter and settings. As such, they have gathered other New Orleanians to share their appreciation of their adopted, artistic "ancestor," who made her home there and walked the streets and rode the trolley cars often alone in the daytime.

About the Author

Rory O'Neill Schmitt, PhD, manages faculty development at University of Southern California's Bovard College. Her award-winning short film, Garden District, has garnered more than twenty awards around the world. Dr. Schmitt specializes in visual art, education and curriculum. Dr. Schmitt has also penned three additional books about the creative process with Arcadia Publishing and The History Press: Navajo and Hopi Art in Arizona (2016), New Orleans Voodoo: A Cultural History (with O'Neill, 2019) and Edgar Degas in New Orleans (with O'Neill, 2023). Rosary O'Neill, PhD, is a Senior Fulbright Drama Specialist and winner of nine Fulbright Awards. She has published nineteen plays with Concord Publishers (Samuel French Publishers), and has published three play anthologies and six books. A Professor Emerita at Loyola University New Orleans, Dr. O'Neill founded the first repertory theater in New Orleans: Southern Rep.