Local color and stories from Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Kate ChopinBlending the best elements of French Acadian culture and Old South, Creole culture Louisiana is one of the richest and most fascinating regions of study. Kate Chopin and Alice Dunbar-Nelson are both writers who have brought this place and the people who live there to life through their writing. Because of their close literary ties to Louisiana and Creole culture, Dunbar-Nelson and Chopin have both sometimes been classified as writers of "local color", a term that is not always well received by authors and which is not always expected to be kind by critics. In her essay “Varieties of Local Color,” Merrill Maguire Skaggs notes that “the local color label has sometimes been used to denigrate the exceptional fiction of several twentieth-century women” (219). The derogatory classification of writers of “local color” sometimes ensnared Chopin, Dunbar-Nelson, and other 19th-century writers, both men and women. The local color label can (and often is) interpreted to mean that the work has only limited appeal as a "novelty" piece about the eccentricities of a particular location. What critics don't realize, however, is that local color writers, good local color writers like Chopin and Dunbar-Nelson, use their fiction not only to record the lives of people in a region, but to show how people in these regions encounter issues that have universal value and respond to them based on their own values ​​and environment. Some of Chopin's and Dunbar-Nelson's locally colored short stories have the biting undercurrent of naturalism, others are more idyllic in their depiction of Creole life, but all have a story to tell the discerning reader. The stories Kate Chopin tells come from the customs and people she observed during her stay in Cloutierville, near her husband's family plantation (Rowe 230). The enduring nature of Chopin's work is a tribute to his understanding of the local color genre. Jim Miller expresses what Chopin must have known: “a place is not simply a natural terrain, but a place plus a human element” (15). “Love to the Good God” is a great example of how Chopin uses southern places and people. Louisiana to tell a story. "L'amour au Bon-Dieu" is an old-fashioned love story, set in Creole culture where class status consciousness reigns, a holdover from the pre-Civil War era, when Creole aristocrats controlled large plantations..