Set in the mysterious shadowed city of New Orleans in the years immediately following the Louisiana Purchase, George Washington Cable's classic novel of the Old South traces the declining fortunes of a family and their society as they struggle with long-standing divisions of race and class and with the ideals of democracy and liberty imposed by their new American rulers.

The hero of the novel, Joseph Frowenfeld, is a young scientist who moves to Louisiana to make his fortune. An outsider, Frowenfeld learns the ways of the Creoles and of the few Americans in the city through his...

In the "Vieux Carri1/2" of New Orleans, the last remnant of old
Creole life in the city, Geoffrey Chester, a young lawyer, is struck by the
charm of a Creole beauty whom he daily meets on his way to the office. It is
love at first sight. But because of the exclusivity of the Creole society to
which she belongs, the affair seems destined to be limited to sight. When a
bookseller consults him about an old manuscript, Chester finds that Aline
Chapdelaines is its owner. The fate of this manuscript and of Chesteri1/2s love
for Aline is the theme of a most...

A pioneering local-color writer about Creole New Orleans and a public advocate for black equality in his native South during and after Reconstruction, George Washington Cable (1844--1925) depicted in his writing the clash between American newcomers and a quaint but proud French-speaking population in post--Louisiana Purchase New Orleans. His work, including the short-story collection Old Creole Days (1879) and his most famous novel, The Grandissimes (1880), received widespread critical acclaim and was serialized in the country's best highbrow magazines. In 1880, Cable was commissioned to...