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BAYOU FOLK

BAYOU FOLK by Chopin, Kate

7 to 14 days for delivery
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Details
$725.00
( US$)
Seller: Sumner & Stillman
Title
BAYOU FOLK
Author
Chopin, Kate
Seller
Sumner & Stillman (United States)
Description
1894. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1894. 2 pp undated ads. Original olive green cloth decorated in gilt. First Edition of Kate Chopin's second (but first obtainable) book, a collection of 23 stories and anecdotes of Louisiana local color. A native of St. Louis, Katherine O'Flaherty (1850-1904) married a successful Louisiana Creole named Oscar Chopin, and lived in New Orleans and on a nearby cotton plantation until his death of swamp fever in 1882, when she was 31; after two years of trying to manage the indebted plantation herself, she returned with her children to St. Louis where, suffering from depression, she was encouraged to write as a form of therapy. Her writing career began with the now-exceedingly-rare AT FAULT (St. Louis 1890, in wrappers) -- and it ended due to the public shock over her fourth book, THE AWAKENING (1899). (She died at age 54, of a brain hemorrhage suffered at the St. Louis World's Fair.) As an example of the BAYOU FOLK tales, "Désirée's Baby" (just twelve pages long) tells of Armand, an antebellum Louisiana aristocrat who, over the objections of friends and family, marries an adopted girl of unknown ancestry. Their newborn baby boy is definitely "dark" -- so Armand turns Désirée and the child out of his house. She did not take the broad, beaten road to the far-off plantation of Valmondé. She walked across a deserted field, where the stubble bruised her tender feet, so delicately shod, and tore her thin gown to shreds. She disappeared among the reeds and willows that grow thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou; and she did not come back again. Some weeks later, burning old letters, Armand discovers one from his mother to his father; the story ends with this quote from that letter: "I thank the good God for having arranged our lives that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery." This copy is very good-plus, perhaps near-fine: there is scarcely any wear other than a cracked rear endpaper, though as always with this olive-green cloth, the spine has aged to a honey-brown. Blanck 3244.

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