Bayou Folk

Kate Chopin's Bayou Folk, first published in 1894, brings together twenty-three stories set among the Creoles, Acadians and African Americans of nineteenth-century Louisiana. Chopin grew up in St. Louis but spent years in New Orleans and in the Cane River country of Natchitoches Parish, and she writes about it with an insider's ease: the speech, the social codes, the small farms and river towns, the heat and the water. Her stories range from comedy to quiet tragedy, and they are full of people who are proud, stubborn, generous and sometimes cruel.

This collection introduced Chopin to a national readership and is a good way to enter her work. Readers who know her later novel The Awakening will recognize the same clear eye and the same interest in women's limited choices, but here the canvas is wider: courtship and marriage, race and ancestry, class and community, memory and loss. The stories are short enough to read in a sitting and rich enough to argue about afterward.

This edition contains the complete text of Bayou Folk, a new introduction for first-time readers, a character guide, a summary of the collection, notes on its major themes, a glossary of Louisiana and period terms, and twelve discussion questions for book clubs and students.