In the decade prior to the publication of her landmark novel, THE AWAKENING (1899), Kate Chopin wrote about ninety short stories, a selection of which appeared in BAYOU FOLK (1894) and A NIGHT IN ACADIE (1897). Chopin was deeply influenced by thework of the French and American realists and her portraits of the inhabitants of nineteenth-century New Orleans and Natchitoches Parish offer one of the most compassionate views of life in American realistic fiction. With a gentle and knowing gaze, Chopin evoked the distant world of Louisiana plantations and 'Cadian balls and describes the thoroughly modern complexities of her characters ethnic, gender and sexual identities.