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. When his father died, 14-year-old George left high school 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...