Kate Chopin was born Katherine O’Flaherty in St. Louis to an Irish immigrant father and to the daughter of an established old St. Louis Creole family. She was raised Catholic and graduated from the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart, entering into the social life of the aristocratic South.

An excellent student and avid reader, Katherine found the social life of St. Louis rather boring, and she turned her talents to writing. At nineteen, she married Oscar Chopin with whom she bore six children before his death. As a couple, she and her husband first settled in New Orleans but moved to the small town of Cloutierville in the Nachitoches parish, the bayou country of northwestern Louisiana and the setting for many of her stories. After the loss of her husband, Katherine moved her young family back to St. Louis. Within a year, she lost her mother, and by the time she was 24, all her brothers and sisters had passed away. Even with the daily duties necessary for raising her children, Kate still felt irrevocably isolated, a theme that repeats itself in much her work. She never married again, and with her family in St. Louis, she turned almost her full attention to writing. In 1889, her first short story was published, and she followed that a year later with the publication of her first novel, At Fault (1890).

Another theme of Kate Chopin’s work is the dysfunctional marriage—its manifestations and effects. She found insipid the works of her contemporaries in the late nineteenth century that feigned repugnance at the sterner stuff of marriage and the difficulties that women often faced in relationships dominated by stifling husbands. The short story "The Story of an Hour" boldly dramatizes the opressiveness that was common in many marriages, oppresiveness that was so strong that even death was welcomed as a release from it. Chopin's most renowned work today, The Awakening (1899), addresses the longing of a woman for a passionate companionship. Her failure leads her only deeper into despair and suicide. While never actually banned, the book received "moral criticism," although many women read it and applauded Chopin for her courage.