George Washington Cable (12 October, 1844 – 31 January, 1925) was an American novelist notable for the realism of his portrayals of Creole life in his native Louisiana. His fiction has been thought to anticipate that of William Faulkner.

Biography

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Cable was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He served in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. At the end of the war in 1865 he went into journalism, writing for the New Orleans Picayune where he would remain through 1879. By that time he was a well established writer. His sympathy for civil rights and antipathy towards the harsh racism of the era showed in his writings, which earned him resentment by many white southerners. He moved to Massachusetts in 1884. He became friends with Mark Twain, and the two writers did speaking tours together.

Cable died in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Quotation

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"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.

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." from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi

Works

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His most important works are Old Creole Days, The Grandissimes, and Madame Delphine.

External links

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• Cable resources page at American Authors (formerly on Gonzaga site)

1844 births | 1925 deaths | People from New Orleans | American novelists

George Washington Cable | Кэбль, Джордж Вашингтон | George Washington Cable