The Awakening shocked turn-of-the-century readers with its forthright treatment of sex and suicide. Departing from literary convention, Kate Chopin failed to condemn her heroine's desire for an affair with the son of a Louisiana resort owner, whom she meets on vacation. The power of sensuality, the delusion of ecstatic love, and the solitude that accompanies the trappings of middle- and upper-class life are the themes of this now-classic novel. As Kaye Gibbons points out in her Introduction, Chopin "was writing American realism before most Americans could bear to hear that they were living it."
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Daniel Defoe, Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, Mateo Falcone, Charlotte Bronte, Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nikolai Gogol, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Guy De Maupassant, Oscar Wilde, Leo Tolstoy, H.G. Wells, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Jack London, E. M. Forster
