Online Encyclopedia

GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE (1844– )

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Originally appearing in Volume V04, Page 920 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE (1844– ) 
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American author, was born .in New Orleans,
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Louisiana, on the 12th of
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October 1844 . At the age of fourteen he entered a mercantile establishment as a clerk; joined the Confederate army (4th
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Mississippi Cavalry) at the age of nineteen; at the close of the war engaged in
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civil
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engineering, and in newspaper
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work in New Orleans; and first became known in literature by sketches and stories of old French-American
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life in that city . These were first published in Scribner's Monthly, and were collected in
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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
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people and places, and a constant combination of gentle pathos with quiet humour . These shorter tales were followed by the novels The Grandissimes (188o), Dr Sevier (1883) and Bonaventure (1888), of which the first dealt with Creole life in Louisiana a
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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 master-piece, 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 . In this, as in nearly all of his stories, he makes much use of the soft French-
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English dialect of Louisiana . He does not confine himself to New Orleans, laying many of his scenes, as in the short story Belles Demoiselles Plantation, in the marshy lowlands towards the mouth of the Mississippi . Cable was the leader in the noteworthy
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literary
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movement which has influenced nearly all
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southern writers since the war of 1861—a movement of which the chief importance
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lay in the determination to portray
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local scenes, characters and
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historical episodes with accuracy instead of merely imaginative romanticism, and to
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interest readers by fidelity and sympathy in the portrayal of things well known to the authors . Other writings by Cable have dealt with various problems of
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race and politics in the southern states during and after the " reconstruction period " following the Civil War; while in The Creoles of Louisiana (1884) he presented a
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history of that folk from the time of its appearance as a social and military factor . His dispassionate treatment of his theme in this
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volume and its predecessors gave increasing offence to sensitive Creoles and their sympathizers, and in 1886 Cable removed to Northampton, Massachusetts . At one time he edited a
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magazine in Northampton, and afterwards conducted the monthly Current Literature, published in New York .

His Collected

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Works were published in a
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uniform issue in 5 vols . (New York, 1898) . Among his later volumes are The Cavalier (1901), Bylow Hill (1902), and Kincaid's Battery (1908) .

End of Article: GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE (1844– )
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