A native of New Orleans, George Washington Cable became the chief support of his family at the age of fourteen and tried various employments while struggling to educate himself. He fought in the Confederate army in the Civil War. Turning to literature increasingly in the 1870s, he acquired fame as a writer of stories of Creole life. He first met SLC in Hartford in June 1881, and the two struck up a warm friendship. They met again in April 1882 in New Orleans. From November 1884 through February 1885, Cable and SLC, billed as the “Twins of Genius,” made a joint lecture tour, speaking in more than sixty cities in the East, the Midwest, and Canada. As an outspoken critic of aspects of southern culture and an advocate of the rights of black Americans, Cable found it difficult to remain in the South, moving to Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1885. SLC was irritated by what he considered Cable’s excessive piety, his parsimony, and also by his more mundane offenses such as hogging the lectern, but the two remained friendly.