Cable

Cable, GEORGE WASHINGTON, a popular American author, was born in New Orleans, October 12, 1844. He had early to shift for himself, and at nineteen volunteered into the Confederate service. He saw some hard service, and in one action was severely wounded. After the war he earned for some time a precarious living, and finally found himself laid up with malarial fever caught at survey work on the Atchafalaya River. During his two years' illness he began to write for the New Orleans papers, and his success ere long was such as to encourage him to devote himself to the literary craft. His sketches of Creole life published in Scribner's Monthly made his reputation, revealing as they did to the world an interesting phase of American social life hitherto unknown. His keen observation and dexterous literary use of the Creole dialect at once found him a public on both sides of the Atlantic. Among his books are Old Creole Days (1879), The Grandissimes (1880), Madame Delphine (1881), Creoles of Louisiana (1884), The Silent South (1885), Bonaventure (1888), and John March, Southerner (1895). Cable has lectured with great success on his chosen subject, and has had the happiness to see important reforms in contract convict labour in the southern states, brought about mainly through his own pen.