George Washington Cable - Biography

Biography

Cable was born in 1844 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of George W. Cable, Sr. and Rebecca Boardman Cable. They were wealthy slaveholders who were part of the Presbyterian Church and city society, whose families had moved there after the Louisiana Purchase. First educated in private schools, the younger Cable had to get work after his father died young. He had lost investments and the family struggled financially. Cable later learned French on his own. He served in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, which he began in support of slavery and the Southern cause..

His experiences changed his ideas about Southern and Louisiana society, and he began writing during a two-year bout with malaria. In 1870 Cable went into journalism, writing for the New Orleans Picayune. He worked for them from 1865-1879, by which time he had become an established writer.

He was invited to submit stories in Scribner's Monthly, where his story "Sieur George", published in 1873, was a critical and popular success. He published six more stories of Creole life with Scribner's in the following three years. The stories were collected and published in a book in 1879 as Old Creole Life. While romantic in plot, the stories revealed the multi-cultural and multi-racial nature of antebellum New Orleans society, with ties among French, Spanish, African, Native American and Caribbean Creoles. He also addressed conflicts that arose following the Louisiana Purchase, when traditional New Orleans French Creole society had to confront Anglo-Americans, who ultimately asserted their concept of a biracial society, rather than allowing a multiracial class.

In 1880 Cable published his first novel, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life, portraying multiracial members and different classes of society in the early 1800s shortly after the Louisiana Purchase. It had first been serialized in Scribner's. He used it as a way to explore society and its racial injustice, as he addressed European Creoles, the mixed-race class, plaçage, slavery and lynchings..

His novella Madame Delphine (1881), expanded from a short story, featured the issue of miscegenation, in which a woman of African descent tries to arrange the marriage of her daughter, who has more European ancestry, to one of the French Creole elite. In 1884 he published a work, Dr. Sevier, on prison reform..

Literary historians have said that Cable's treatment of racism in his fiction influenced the later work of William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. He has been called "the most important southern artist working in the late 19th century, as well as the first modern southern writer."

After these works, Cable seemed to split his efforts between romantic novels and non-fiction articles, in which he expressed his sympathy for racial equality and opposition to Jim Crow, such as "The Freedman's Case in Equity" and "The Silent South," both published in 1885. His essays were resented by many white Southerners and generated much controversy..

Since the end of the war, whites had worked to re-establish political and social supremacy over freedmen and those who were free people of color in the antebellum years. The Ku Klux Klan and paramilitary groups had practiced racial intimidation and other efforts to dissuade blacks from voting. After Reconstruction, when Democrats regained control of the state legislature, they imposed legal racial segregation and other measures against blacks.

So much hostility was expressed against Cable in 1885 that he decided to leave the South. He moved with his family to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he continued to write about the South in novels and critical essays. In 1888, he published Bonaventure, described as an "Acadian pastoral." In total, he published 14 novels and collections of short fiction. His last novel was Lovers of Louisiana (1918).

He became friends with Mark Twain, and the two writers did speaking tours together. Twain said of him that

"when it comes down to moral honesty, limpid impotence, and utterly blameless piety, the Apostles were mere policemen to Cable," despite his dark, "indelicate" depictions of society.

Cable died in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1925.