George Washington Cable

Who Was George Washington Cable?

George Washington Cable was the first major writer to render the culture of Louisiana Creole society with literary seriousness — a Confederate veteran whose fiction became one of the most sustained indictments of the racial injustice that followed the Civil War. Born in New Orleans in 1844 to a slave-holding family, he served in the Confederate cavalry and returned after the war to work as a journalist and accountant before his fiction brought him national fame.

His first novel, The Grandissimes (1880), is one of the finest works of post-Civil War American fiction: a richly detailed portrait of New Orleans Creole society in the early nineteenth century that uses the past to indict the racial arrangements of the present. His short story collection Old Creole Days (1879) established him as the foremost interpreter of Louisiana culture in American letters.

Cable is significant for TLA because his work embodies a specific form of moral courage: the willingness of a white Southerner, formed in the slave-holding tradition, to use his literary gifts to expose the injustice of that tradition and to argue, at considerable personal cost, for the full humanity and full civil rights of Black Americans. He was eventually driven from the South by the hostility his positions generated and spent the rest of his life in Massachusetts.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Old Creole Days — 1879 — short stories
• The Grandissimes — 1880
• Madame Delphine — 1881
• The Silent South — 1885 — essays
• Strange True Stories of Louisiana — 1889