Kate Chopin’s Popularity at Colleges and Universities

Scholars at the Open Syllabus project at Columbia University in New York have for years been collecting syllabi in different fields from colleges and universities around the world. They explain that “Open Syllabus is a massive non-profit archive of the main activity of higher education: teaching. It provides top-down views of the curriculum across thousands of schools to support curricular innovation, lifelong learning, and student success.”

The scholars now have a database of 27 million syllabi, and they continue to update what their data shows.

Here is a current (June 2025) list of the most widely assigned authors in the academic field of “English Literature” (meaning literature written in English).  If you set aside from the list contemporary writers of college textbooks, you’ll see that:

• Kate Chopin is the most widely assigned nineteenth-century American author — followed by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Frederick Douglass.

• Chopin is the fifth most widely assigned American author from any century — following Toni Morrison, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.

• And she is the eighth most widely assigned author writing in English in any era in any country — following William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway.

Here’s the Open Syllabus list of Kate Chopin’s works assigned. You’ll see that “The Story of an Hour” and The Awakening continue to be Chopin’s most popular works among teachers at colleges and universities around the world.