LYCOS RETRIEVER 
George Washington Cable: New Orleans
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After the Civil War, noted author George Washington Cable moved to Northampton because his portrayal of racial issues in his novels made him unwelcome in his native New Orleans. On the other hand, Cable, and others like him, were alarmed by the welter of ethnic immigrants flocking to America in the late nineteenth century. With the backing of Andrew Carnegie, he founded the Home Culture Clubs (later the Peoples' Institute) to "Americanize" and uplift working girls unaccustomed to New England ways. Cable arranged for students at Smith College to hold classes for the city's wage earners.
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CABLE, GEORGE WASHINGTON (1844- ) American author, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on the 12th of October 1844. At the age of fourteen he entered a mercantile establishment as a clerk; joined the Confederate army (4th Mississippi Cavalry) at the age of nineteen; at the close of the war engaged in civil engineering, and in newspaper work in New Orleans; and first became known in literature by sketches and stories of old French-American life in that city. These were first published in Scribner's Monthly, and were collected in book form in 1879, under the title of Old Creole Days. The characteristics of the series—of which the novelette Madame Delphine (1881) is virtually a part—are neatness of touch, sympathetic accuracy of description of people and places, and a constant combination of gentle pathos with quiet humour. These shorter tales were followed by the novels The Grandissimes (1880), Dr Sevier (1883) and Bonaventure (1888), of which the first dealt with Creole life in Louisiana a hundred years ago, while the second was related to the period of the Civil War of 1861-65. Dr Sevier, on the whole, is to be accounted Cable's masterpiece, its character of Narcisse combining nearly all the qualities which have given him his place in American literature as an artist and a social chronicler.
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Among those writers whose letters are included in this collection are Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Alice Brown, George Washington Cable, Margaret Deland, Mary Mapes Dodge, Louise Imogen Guiney, William Vaughn Moody, and Kate Douglas Wiggin. Bates ... corresponded with editors and publishers, including Mary Louise Booth, Louise Chandler Moulton, and H.E. Scudder. In addition, the collection contains letters written by C. F. Adams, railroad magnate and grandson of former President John Quincy Adams; Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. Senator and orator; Charles W. Eliot, former President of Harvard University; and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a New England abolitionist who commanded the first African American regiment raised in the South (the First South Carolina Volunteers) during the Civil War.
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Chesnutt wrote this novel at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, but set it in a time and place favored by George Washington Cable. Published now for the first time, Paul Marchand: Free Man of Color examines the system of race and caste in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Chesnutt reacts, as well, against the traditional stance that fiction by leading American writers of the previous generation had taken on the issue of miscegenation. After living for many years in France, the wealthy and sophisticated Paul Marchand returns to his home in New Orleans and discovers through a will that he is white and is now head of a prosperous and influential family. Since mixed-race marriages are illegal, he must renounce his mulatto wife and bastardize his children.
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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 opposition towards the harsh racism of the era showed in his writings, earning him resentment by many white Southerners. In 1884, Cable moved to Massachusetts.
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Cable’s Grandissimes, a work that late nineteenth century tourists actually used in their tours of New Orleans because of its meticulous fidelity to place, is permeated with an obvious love for his native city. Mining the cultural humus that had accumulated over the city’s long and culturally varied history, Cable crafts a work that both celebrates, yet refuses to turn from the grim reality of its slave-tainted past. As some critics have noted, The Grandissimes represents the first significant attempt in literature by a native Southerner to grapple with this disturbing problem that has affected the region on every fundamental level. Slavery, Cable seems to be saying, is a sin that was produced collectively and must be similarly expiated. Mark Twain (a friend of Cable's) felt that he was the only writer in all the South, despite its post-war embrace of modern commercialism, who thought beyond its attachment to its feudal past – the only writer, in effect, who thought like a modern.
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