The third child and eldest daughter of a prosperous New Orleans lawyer, William Woodson King, and his wife, the former Sarah Ann Miller, Grace Elizabeth King recalled in later years a comfortable family life and the pleasant rigors of convent schooling, but the Civil War changed all that. With her parents and siblings the nine-year-old fled the city in the spring of 1862 and sat out the conflict in the comparative safety of the family plantation. The period following the war was hard, and when the King family returned to New Orleans, it was to a small house in a poor neighborhood; years passed before the once-proud family was able to extricate itself from the humbling confines of poverty. The young Grace King was determined to write and to travel, however, and she succeeded at both, profiting along the way by the many friendships that she made. Beginning in 1887 she spent several summers with the Charles Dudley Warner family in Connecticut, where she was introduced to many important literary people of the day, including Samuel Clemens, who became her close friend, and William Dean Howells. She traveled in Europe in 1891-1892. In England King was asked to speak to the young women of Newnham College, Cambridge, on the subject of Sidney Lanier and his work.
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