George Washington Cable (October 12, 1844 – January 31, 1925) was an American novelist notable for the realism of his portrayals of Creole life in his native New Orleans, Louisiana. He has been called "the most important southern artist working in the late 19th century", as well as "the first modern Southern writer". In 1870, he became a journalist, writing for the New Orleans Picayune. He worked for the newspaper from 1865 to 1879, by which time he had become an established writer. In 1869, George Cable married Louisa Stewart Bartlett, with whom he had several children.

Cable was invited to submit stories to Scribner's Monthly, which published his story "Sieur George" in 1873, a critical and popular success. He published six more stories of Creole life with Scribner's in the following three years. These were collected and published in a book in 1879 as Old Creole Days. The plot follows the adventures and romances of several members of the Grandissime family, a French Creole family with mixed-race members.

His novella Madame Delphine (1881), expanded from a short story, featured the issue of miscegenation, in which a woman of partially African descent tries to arrange the marriage of her daughter, who has more European ancestry, to one of the French Creole elite. That year, 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).

Cable's wife Louise died in 1904; and in 1906 he married Eva Stenson. After Eva's death, he married a third time, to Hanna Cowing in 1923. Two years later, Cable himself died, in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Response and legacy

right|frame|Sketch of Cable in 1905

Cable was friends with Mark Twain, and the two writers did speaking tours together. In 1884 and 1885 they visited Toronto, Canada, twice, on a reading tour known as the "Twins of Genius" tour. Twain said of Cable that "when it comes down to moral honesty, limpid innocence, and utterly blameless piety, the Apostles were mere policemen [compared] to Cable," despite his dark, "indelicate" depictions of society. Twain also mentions Cable in his book Life on the Mississippi:

<blockquote>The party had the privilege of idling through this ancient quarter of New Orleans with the South's finest literary genius, the author of "the Grandissimes." In him the South has found a masterly delineator of its interior life and its history. In truth, I find by experience, that the untrained eye and vacant mind can inspect it and learn of it and judge of it more clearly and profitably in his books than by personal contact with it.</blockquote>

<blockquote>With Mr. Cable along to see for you, and describe and explain and illuminate, a jog through that old quarter is a vivid pleasure. And you have a vivid sense as of unseen or dimly seen things—vivid, and yet fitful and darkling; you glimpse salient features, but lose the fine shades or catch them imperfectly through the vision of the imagination: a case, as it were, of ignorant near-sighted stranger traversing the rim of wide vague horizons of Alps with an inspired and enlightened long-sighted native.</blockquote>

Modern 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."

In 2008 a new edition of his history of the South, including footnotes and research, was published by Louisiana State University Press under the title, The New Orleans of George Washington Cable: The 1887 Census Office Report, edited and with an introduction by Lawrence N. Powell.

Cable may have coined the term "authors' editor", in his 1910 tribute to his editor Richard Watson Gilder, when he wrote "I think he was peculiarly an authors' editor, and not merely a publishers'."; this is the earliest known use of the term in print.

Works

thumb|250px|right|Title page of Kincaid's Battery (1908) with [[Book frontispiece|frontispiece by Alonzo Myron Kimball]]

  • Old Creole Days (1879)
  • The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880)
  • Madame Delphine (1881)
  • Dr. Sevier (1882)
  • The Creoles of Louisiana (1884)
  • Bonaventure (1888)
  • The Silent South (1889)
  • The Negro Question (1890)
  • Strange True Stories of Louisiana (1890)
  • The Busy Man's Bible and How to Study and Teach It (1891)
  • A Memory of Roswell Smith (1892)
  • Famous Adventures and Prison Escapes of the Civil War (1893)
  • John March, Southerner (1894)
  • Strong Hearts (1899)
  • The Cavalier (1901)
  • Bylow Hill (1902)
  • Kincaid's Battery (1908)
  • Possen Jone' and Pere Raphael (1909)
  • The Amateur Garden (1914)
  • Gideon's Band (1914)
  • The Flower of the Chapdelaines (1917)
  • Lovers of Louisiana (1918)

See also

  • George Washington Cable House
  • Lyle Saxon, a later Louisiana writer and bon vivant

Further reading

  • Andrews, William L., Minrose Gwin, Trudier Harris and Fred Hobson, eds., The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998, p.&nbsp;275-276
  • Cleman, John, George Washington Cable Revisited, Ed. Nancy Walker, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996, pp.&nbsp;1–19
  • Forkner, Ben, Samway, Patrick, eds., A New Reader of the Old South, Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers,1991,
  • Forkner, Ben, Samway, Patrick, eds., Stories of the Old South, New York: Viking Penguin,1989,
  • Harrison, Suzan, "The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life," Masterplots, Revised Second Edition, Salem Press, 1996
  • Lauter, Paul, ed., The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 4th edition, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2002
  • Pizer, Donald and Earl N. Harbert, eds., Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Realists and Naturalists, volume 12, Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1982
  • Rubin, Louis D., Writers of the Modern South: The Faraway Country, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966
  • Wilson, Edmund, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1962

References

  • Works by George Washington Cable, at HathiTrust
  • Finding aid to George Washington Cable papers at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
  • "George Washington Cable: resources", American Authors (hosted by Washington State University)
  • Bond Thompson, Armistead Lemon, "Summary: George Washington Cable (1844-1925)/ The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life, Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina
  • "George Washington Cable", Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 1989, hosted at Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina
  • George Washington Cable Collection at The Historic New Orleans Collection
  • New edition of Old Creole Days release at W2G Publishing featuring new, full color artwork.