George Washington Cable

The American novelist George Washington Cable (1844-1925) was an important regional writer whose best-received books were set in Louisiana. He was also an early Southern advocate of civil rights for African Americans.

George Washington Cable was born in New Orleans, the son of a Virginia-born father and a mother whose ancestors were New England Puritans. and became the chief support of his mother and her sizable family. He served in the Confederate Army until the end of the Civil War. After working at several small jobs, Cable became a columnist and reporter on the New Orleans Picayune.

In 1869 Cable married Louise Stewart Bartlett, who would be his inspiration and assistant for 35 years. Stories sold to Northern magazines from 1873 to 1878 provided insufficient funds to support dependent relatives and a rapidly growing family (four daughters and a son by 1879), and he dropped writing for a time to work at three bookkeeping jobs. But payment he received for research for the U.S. Census and the success of Old Creole Days (1879), a collection of his stories, enabled him once more to devote full time to writing, the fruits of which were a novel, The Grandissimes (1880). Northern readers who particularly enjoyed regional literature delighted in Cable's uniquely graceful and delicate evocations of New Orleans and Louisiana plantation country.

By contrast, the Creoles, descendants of French or Spanish settlers of the Mississippi Delta country, disliked Cable's representations of them. He was fiercely criticized for having attacked various Southern practices and attitudes (including the treatment of African Americans) in his speeches, articles, and books such as The Grandissimes, Madame Delphine (1881), Dr. Sevier (1884), and The Silent South (1885). During Northern travels, notably a joint reading tour with Mark Twain in 1884-1885, Cable found the atmosphere friendlier, and in 1885 he moved his family (eventually including eight children, seven surviving childhood) to Northampton, Mass., which was destined to be his home until his death.

Cable continued to champion african Americans rights in articles and lectures during years when the cause was not popular even in the North. Although Bonaventure (1888), a collection of stories, contained few social preachments, The Negro Question (1890) attacked racism. He founded the Home Culture Clubs, reading groups which dealt with Southern social problems.

Cable's best work appeared before 1890. John March, Southerner (1895) showed his weakness in portraying an area other than Louisiana, and The Cavalier (1901), though a financial success, was an inferior swashbuckling romance. Gideon's Band (1914) authentically pictures Mississippi River life but is theatrical. After many years of illness, Louise Cable died in 1904. In 1906 Cable married Eva C. Stevenson, who died in 1923; and in that year he married Hannah Cowing, who survived his death on Jan. 31, 1925.

Further Reading

Arlin Turner, George W. Cable (1956), is a splendid full-length biography. Cable's daughter, Lucy Leffingwell Cable Bicklé, stresses family life in George Washington Cable: His Life and Letters (1928). Charles Philip Butcher, George W. Cable (1962), and Edmund Wilson, Patriotic George: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962), provide excellent critical discussions.

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Cable, George Washington, 1844-1925, American author, b. New Orleans. He is remembered primarily for his early sketches and novels of creole life, which established his reputation as an important local-color writer. Cable served as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War and afterward was a writer and reporter for the New Orleans Picayune. His short stories of New Orleans culture began to appear in Scribner's Monthly in 1873; they were collected and published as Old Creole Days (1879). Among his novels are The Grandissimes (1880), Madame Delphine (1881), Dr. Sevier (1884), and Gideon's Band (1914). Cable's works depict the picturesque life of creoles in antebellum Louisiana with charm and freshness. Discernible in some of them is the author's moral opposition to slavery and class distinction. After 1884, Cable lived in Northampton, Mass. His later works, notably the essays collected in The Silent South (1885) and The Negro Question (1890), reveal his concern with social evils, particularly with the betrayal of the freed African American slaves.

Bibliography

See his letters, ed. by L. L. Leffingwell (1928, repr. 1967); biography by L. D. Rubin (1969); study by P. C. Butcher (1959).

(1844-1925)

1879	Old Creole Days. Cable's first book is a collection of short stories depicting Creole life in New Orleans. It advances the American local-color movement and remains one of the most significant collections of that genre. His popular story "Madame Delphine" (1881) would be included in later editions.
1880	The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life. Cable's first novel (and his best) is set at the time of the Louisiana Purchase and concerns the feud between two aristocratic Creole families in New Orleans. Involving white and black half-brothers and a love triangle involving a mulatto, a quadroon woman, and a slave, the novel frankly recognizes miscegenation under slavery. Its theme of a Southern heritage of past crimes and guilt anticipates similar concerns in William Faulkner's novels.
1881	Madame Delphine. Cable's novella tells the story of a quadroon woman's attempt to secure an advantageous marriage for her light-skinned daughter by passing her off as white. Southern hostility to the work helps convince Cable to leave the South for Massachusetts.
1884	The Creoles of Louisiana. Cable's history infuriates Creoles by suggesting that they descend from settlers driven to America for profit who married Indians, Africans, and former inmates of French prisons.
1885	The Silent South. Having infuriated Creoles with The Creoles of Louisiana (1884) by suggesting that they had descended from profit-driven men who had married Indians, Africans, and former inmates of French prisons, Cable next critiques the South in general, arguing for prison reforms, abolition of contract labor, and improved treatment of African Americans. The hostile reaction to this work contributes to his leaving the South for Massachusetts, where he would continue to write on Southern social problems, producing The Negro Question (1888) and The Southern Struggle for Pure Government (1890).
1885	Dr. Sevier. Cable's novel treats antebellum social life in New Orleans from the perspective of a kindly physician and his ambitious protégé.
1890	The Negro Question. In this essay collection, Cable challenges prevailing views by advocating equal access to education for blacks and rejecting the myth of black mental inferiority.
1895	John March, Southerner. Cable's final social problem novel depicts its title character trying to balance antebellum Southern values with the changes brought by Reconstruction. He would write his subsequent novels--historical romances--mainly to entertain.
1899	Strong Hearts. The best of the three stories in this collection is "The Solitary," a character study of a man who cures his alcoholism by deliberately marooning himself for a month on a desert island. Although strongly moralistic, the directness and skill of the writing have evoked comparisons with Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" (1898). A final collection of stories, The Flower of the Chapdelaines, would follow in 1918.
1901	The Cavalier. Bowing to financial pressure, Cable turns from his unpopular polemical John March, Southerner (1893) to a historical romance that becomes so popular that he would adapt it for the stage in 1902. It proves to be his last success; a steady decline in his literary powers would follow.

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