Kate Chopin, known in her lifetime as a writer of stories set in the French-settled regions of Louisiana and today as the author of THE AWAKENING, has been viewed as a woman who, until she wrote her final novel, catered to the taste for regional fiction and led a conventional domestic life. In this study, Nancy A. Walker demonstrates that Chopin was an astute literary professional who consciously crafted an acceptable public identity while she pursued an active intellectual life and negotiated a diverse literary marketplace. The book first places Chopin in the context of nineteenth-century American women writers and then describes her apprenticeship as a lifelong reader and observer of human behaviour. Detailed studies of her first novel, AT FAULT, and her last collection of short stories, A VOCATION AND A VOICE, show Chopin to be a skilled social satirist and a writer who explored human passion and isolation well before she wrote THE AWAKENING.