George Washington Cable

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George Washington Cable, 1903

George Washington Cable (born October 12, 1844 in New Orleans , Louisiana , † January 31, 1925 Saint Petersburg , Florida ) was an American writer .

Life

George W. Cable was born to a businessman who, after his death in 1859, left his family penniless. Cable, initially a proponent of slavery , fought in the Civil War as a cavalryman in the Confederate Army . After the war he worked as a clerk and began writing for newspapers. He can be seen as a representative of local color fiction , the local color movement that emerged after the war mainly in the southern states and California and introduced realistic, detailed design elements into literature. George Washington Cable died on January 31, 1925, aged over 80 in St. Petersburg, Florida.

In 1898 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

plant

In 1873 Scribner's Monthly Cables printed the first story, which made him known in the northern states. Similar to Joel Chandler Harris, he wrote about the southern states, their people and their problems and was influenced by Victor Hugo and Prosper Mérimée , but also by Edgar Allan Poe . Although romantic and sentimental elements in Cables' work - similar to other representatives of local color fiction , such as Bret Harte - cannot be overlooked, most of the stories depict in a realistic and detailed manner the complicated situation of the Creole population of Louisiana after the sale of the French, previously temporarily Spanish territory to the United States in 1803. In 1879 his first collected stories appeared in a small edition under the title Old Creole Days by Scribner in New York. Six months after its publication, 1200 copies of the second edition of this book had already been sold. Since then, Cable has been a classic. Oscar Wilde visited him in 1882 . In 1884 he left New Orleans and went to Massachusetts to avoid the hostility that his consistent criticism of the caste spirit and the slave economy aroused.

Many of his stories are set in New Orleans; he was considered a master of description and dialect rendering. With his novel The Grandissimes (1880) Cable caused a national sensation: in the north the novel was received with enthusiasm, in the south, however, with rejection; Cable was seen there as a traitor because he had touched the sore point of his birth state, the race problem, and had come out against slavery . In addition, his Creoles, whose mother tongue was mostly French, only speak broken or faulty English, which earned him the allegation of discrimination.

In stories like Belles Demoiselles Plantation , he had dealt with the colonial racial legislation, the Old Black Code and the resulting tragic conflicts in the "mixed race" New Orleans In 1890, Cable's first works were translated into German.

Works

  • Old Creole Days (1879); German: Tite Poulette and other creole stories . Insel-Verlag, Leipzig 1996.
  • The Creoles of Louisiana (1884); English: John C. Nimmo, London, 1885; Kindle edition, Amazon 2003
  • Dr. Sevier . Garrett Press, New York 1970 (repr. Of the Boston 1885 edition).
  • The grandissimes. A story from the deep south ("The Grandissimes"). Manesse-Verlag, Zurich 1976, ISBN 3-7175-1518-7 .
  • John March, Southerner . Mnemosyne Publications, Miami, FL 1969 (Rep. Of New York 1894).
  • Madame Delphine of New Orleans. Roman ("Madame Delphin"). Verlag der Arche, Zurich 1981, ISBN 3-7160-1740-X .
  • The Negro question. A selection of writings on civil rights in the south . Doubleday, New York 1958.
  • The silent south . Patterson Smith, New York 1969, ISBN 0-87585-057-X .
  • Strange true stories of Louisiana . Echo Library, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-406-84145-9 .

literature

  • Philip Butcher: George Washington Cable . Grosset & Dunlap, New York 1962
  • John Cleman: George Washington Carver revisited . Twayne Publications, New York 1996, ISBN 0-8057-3991-2 .
  • Kjell Ekstrøm: George Washington Cable. A study of his early life and work . Kraus Reprint, Nendeln, Liechtenstein, 1973
  • Horst Ihde : Epilogue to Tite Poulette and other creole stories. Insel-Verlag Leipzig 1986
  • Arlin Turner: Critical essays on George W. Cable . Hall, Boston, Mass. 1980, ISBN 0-8161-8256-6 .
  • Arlin Turner: George W. Cable . Louisiana State Univ. Pr., Baton Rouge, LA. 1966.

Web links

Commons : George Washington Cable  - Collection of Images, Videos, and Audio Files

References and comments

  1. ^ Members: George Washington Cable. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 20, 2019 .
  2. ^ German title "The Plantage to the Beautiful Young Misses"; (Tr .: Elisabeth Schnack ), contained in the anthology "The tree with the bitter figs"
  3. ↑ cit. after Elisabeth Schnack. The den with the bitter figs. (Anthology) Zurich, Diogenes, 1967 .; P. 409.


personal data
SURNAME Cable, George Washington
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 12, 1844
PLACE OF BIRTH New Orleans
DATE OF DEATH January 31, 1925
Place of death Saint Petersburg