George Washington Cable (October 12, 1844 – January 31, 1925) was an American novelist notable for the realism of his portrayals of Creole life in his native New Orleans, Louisiana.

Supporting the Confederacy during the American Civil War, he served in the Confederate States Army, enlisting in the 4th Mississippi Cavalry Regiment in October 1863 at age 19.

[3] While romantic in plot, the stories revealed the multi-cultural and multi-racial nature of antebellum New Orleans society, with ties among French, Spanish, African, Native American, and Caribbean Creoles.

[4] In 1880, Cable published his first novel, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life, portraying multiracial members and different classes of society in the early 1800s shortly after the Louisiana Purchase.

[6] His novella Madame Delphine (1881), expanded from a short story, featured the issue of miscegenation, in which a woman of partially African descent tries to arrange the marriage of her daughter, who has more European ancestry, to one of the French Creole elite.

[3] After these works, Cable seemed to split his efforts between romantic novels and non-fiction articles, in which he expressed his support for racial equality and opposition to Jim Crow,[1] such as "The Freedman's Case in Equity" and "The Silent South," both published in 1885.

[3] After the end of the American Civil War, white supremacists worked to re-establish political and social supremacy over freedmen and over those who in the antebellum years had been free people of color.

After Reconstruction, when Democrats regained control of the state legislature, they worked to disenfranchise blacks, and imposed legal racial segregation and other restrictive measures.

Twain also mentions Cable in his book Life on the Mississippi: The party had the privilege of idling through this ancient quarter of New Orleans with the South's finest literary genius, the author of "the Grandissimes."

In truth, I find by experience, that the untrained eye and vacant mind can inspect it and learn of it and judge of it more clearly and profitably in his books than by personal contact with it.With Mr. Cable along to see for you, and describe and explain and illuminate, a jog through that old quarter is a vivid pleasure.

And you have a vivid sense as of unseen or dimly seen things—vivid, and yet fitful and darkling; you glimpse salient features, but lose the fine shades or catch them imperfectly through the vision of the imagination: a case, as it were, of ignorant near-sighted stranger traversing the rim of wide vague horizons of Alps with an inspired and enlightened long-sighted native.Modern literary historians have said that Cable's treatment of racism in his fiction influenced the later work of William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren.