Cable, George W.

▪ American author

in full  George Washington Cable  

born Oct. 12, 1844, New Orleans, La., U.S.

died Jan. 31, 1925, St. Petersburg, Fla.

 American author and reformer, noted for fiction dealing with life in New Orleans.

      Cable's first books—Old Creole Days (1879), a collection of stories, and The Grandissimes (1880), a novel—marked Creole New Orleans as his literary province and were widely praised. In these works he sought to recapture the picturesque life of the old French-Spanish city. Yet he employed a realism new to Southern fiction.

      Although Cable was the son of slaveholders and fought in the Confederate cavalry, he saw slavery and attempts to deny the freedmen full public rights as moral wrongs. Thus, in his early fiction, his handling of caste and class and authorized oppression contained overtones of moral condemnation. He used essays and public lectures to urge the cause of black rights, in the face of violent abuse in the Southern press, and he published two collections of his social essays, The Silent South (1885) and The Negro Question (1888). He abandoned the effort only after discrimination in the South had become entrenched. In 1885 he settled in Northampton, Mass. He wrote novels set mainly in the South until he was past 70, but, though better constructed, they were felt to lack the freshness and charm and also the force of moral conviction that characterized his early books.

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