GEORGE W. CABLE
(1844-)
Perhaps the first intimation given to the world of a literary and artistic awakening in the Southern States of America after the Civil War, was the appearance in Scribner's Magazine of a series of short stories, written by an unknown and hitherto untried hand, and afterward collected and republished in 'Old Creole Days.' This was long before the vogue of the short story, and that the publication of these tales was regarded as a literary event in those days is sufficient testimony to their power.
George W. Cable
They were fresh, full of color and poetic feeling—romantic with the romance that abounds in the life they portrayed, redolent of indigenous perfumes,—magnolia, lemon, orange, and myrtle, mingled with French exotics of the boudoir,—interpretive in these qualities, through a fine perception, of a social condition resulting from the transplanting to a semi-tropical soil of a conservative, wealthy, and aristocratic French community. Herein lay much of their most inviting charm; but more than this, they were racy with twinkling humor, tender with a melting pathos, and intensely dramatic.
An intermixture of races with strong caste prejudices, and a time of revolution and change, present eminently the condition and the moment for the romance. And when added to this, he finds to his hand an almost tropical setting, and so picturesque a confusion of liquid tongues as exists in the old Franco-Spanish-Afro-Italian-American city of New Orleans, there would seem to be nothing left to be desired as "material." The artist who seized instinctively this opportunity was born at New Orleans on October 12th, 1844, of colonial Virginia stock on the one side, and New England on the other. His early life was full of vicissitudes, and he was over thirty before he discovered story-telling to be his true vocation. From that time he has diligently followed it, having published three novels, 'The Grandissimes,' 'Dr. Sevier,' 'Bonaventure,' and 'John March, Southerner,' besides another volume of short stories.
That having received his impressions in the period of transition and ferment following the upheaval of 1861-1865, with the resulting exaggerations and distortions of a normal social condition, he chose to lay his scenes a half-century earlier, proclaims him still more the artist; who would thus gain a freer play of fancy and a surer perspective, and who, saturated with his subject, is not afraid to trust his imagination to interpret it.