Chopin was born Katherine O'Flaherty on February 8, 1851, to a prominent family in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father died a in train accident when she was only four years old, and young Kate was brought up in a household with her mother and her great-grandmother, who descended from French-Creole pioneers. She also spent a great deal of time with the family's Creole and mulatto (a person of mixed white and African-American ancestry) slaves, which made her familiar with the unique dialects she would later create so accurately in her writings.

After graduating from high school, Chopin spent two years as a St. Louis belle. She married Oscar Chopin, a wealthy Creole cotton factory owner in 1870, and the couple moved to New Orleans. Over the next decade, Chopin lived out the life of a southern aristocrat, until in 1880, because of financial difficulties, the Chopin family (which now included...