Kate Chopin in New Orleans

Authors Rory O'Neill Schmitt and Rosary O'Neill share the NOLA life of Kate Chopin, the first great American woman novelist. In this epic story, Chopin becomes a Phoenix rising amidst the disgrace, death, and abandonment in the romantic desperate setting of post-Civil War Louisiana. This book, a follow up to Edgar Degas in New Orleans, presents Chopin, who lived in the same neighborhood as the Degas family during that time. Chopin celebrated in New Orleans’ great homes and mansions up River Road with their wonderland of oaks, columns, balconies. She had lived in the Garden District, watched New Orleans trolleys with their big windows roll past the Gothic mansions and Greco-Roman houses on St. Charles Avenue, strolled languidly through Audubon Park with its oak tree wonderland full of swamps and lush Louisiana foliage.

Rory O’Neill Schmitt, PhD, manages faculty development at University of Southern California’s Bovard College. Her award-winning short film, Garden District, has garnered more than twenty awards around the world. Dr. Schmitt specializes in visual art, education and curriculum. Dr. Schmitt has also penned three additional books about the creative process with Arcadia Publishing and The History Press: Navajo and Hopi Art in Arizona (2016), New Orleans Voodoo: A Cultural History (with O’Neill, 2019) and Edgar Degas in New Orleans (with O’Neill, 2023). Rosary O’Neill, PhD, is a Senior Fulbright Drama Specialist and winner of nine Fulbright Awards. She has published nineteen plays with Concord Publishers (Samuel French Publishers), and has published three play anthologies and six books. A Professor Emerita at Loyola University New Orleans, Dr. O’Neill founded the first repertory theater in New Orleans: Southern Rep.