Books : Literature & Fiction : World Literature : United States : African American : Gaines, Ernest

Shop Categories

...African American

Lesson Before Dying

Ernest J. Gaines
A Lesson Before Dying (Five Star)

Ernest J. Gaines
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

Ernest J. Gaines

"This is a novel in the guise of the tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a witness to the black militancy of the 1960's. In this woman Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure, a woman equipped to stand beside William Faulkner's Dilsey in The Sound And The Fury." Miss Jane Pittman, like Dilsey, has 'endured,' has seen almost everything and foretold the rest. Gaines' novel brings to mind other great works The Odyssey for the way his heroine's travels manage to summarize the American history of her race, and Huckleberry Finn for the clarity of her voice, for her rare capacity to sort through the mess of years and things to find the one true story in it all." -- Geoffrey Wolff, Newsweek.

"Stunning. I know of no black novel about the South that excludes quite the same refreshing mix of wit and wrath, imagination and indignation, misery and poetry. And I can recall no more memorable female character in Southern fiction since Lena of Faulkner's Light In August than Miss Jane Pittman." -- Josh Greenfeld, Life
A Gathering of Old Men

Ernest J. Gaines

Set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s, A Gathering of Old Men is a powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man.

"Poignant, powerful, earthy...a novel of Southern racial confrontation in which a group of elderly black men band together against whites who seek vengeance for the murder of one of their own."--Booklist

"A fine novel...there is a denouement that will shock and move readers as much as it does the characters."--Philadelphia Inquirer
In my father's house

Ernest J Gaines

When the Civil War begins to escalate, Oscie Mason must try to keep her family intact as she reconciles her stepfather's beliefs about slavery and the war with her own.
A Lesson Before Dying

Ernest J. Gaines

From the author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman comes a deep and compassionate novel. A young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to teach visits a black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting.

From the Trade Paperback edition.
Bloodline

Ernest J. Gaines

In these five stories, Gaines returns to the cane fields, sharecroppers' shacks, and decaying plantation houses of Louisiana, the terrain of his great novels A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying. As rendered by Gaines, this country becomes as familiar, and as haunted by cruelty, suffering, and courage, as Ralph Ellison's Harlem or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.

STORIES INCLUDE:

A Long Day in November

The Sky Is Gray

Three Men

Bloodline

Just Like a Tree
Of Love and Dust

Ernest J. Gaines

Ernest J. Gaines is best known for his prize-winning THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN, but OF LOVE AND DUST has equal power and fascination. It zeros in on an explosion in the making between two men, one black and one white, trapped in the vise of Southern back country prejudice.
When young Marcus is bonded out of jail, he is sent to the Hebert Plantation to work in the fields. He treats Sidney Bonbon, the Cajun overseer, with contempt and Bonbon retaliates by working him nearly to death. Marcus decides to take his revenge.
In My Father's House

Ernest J. Gaines

A story of a man brought to reckon with his buried past. Reverend Martin comes face to face with the sins of his youth in the person of Robert X, a young, unkempt stranger who arrives in town for a mysterious "meeting" with the Reverend.
Catherine Carmier

Ernest J. Gaines

By the author of A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Catherine Carmier is a compelling love story set in a deceptively bucolic Louisiana countryside, where blacks, Cajuns, and whites maintain an uneasy coexistence.

After living in San Francisco for ten years, Jackson returns home to his benefactor, Aunt Charlotte. Surrounded by family and old friends, he discovers that his bonds to them have been irreparably rent by his absence. In the midst of his alienation from those around him, he falls in love with Catherine Carmier, setting the stage for conflicts and confrontations which are complex, tortuous, and universal in their implications.
Mozart and Leadbelly

Ernest J. Gaines

In this collection of stories and essays, the beloved author of the classic, best-selling novel A Lesson Before Dying shares the inspirations behind his books and his reasons for becoming a writer. Told in the simple and powerful prose that is a hallmark of his craft, these writings by Ernest J. Gaines faithfully evoke the sorrows and joys of rustic Southern life. From his depiction of his childhood move to California — a move that propelled him to find books that conjured the sights, smells, and locution of his native Louisiana home — to his description of the real-life murder case that gave him the idea for his masterpiece, this wonderful collection is a revelation of both man and writer.
Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays

Ernest J. Gaines, Marcia Gaudet, Reggie Young, Ernest Gaines

In this collection of stories and essays, the beloved author of the classic, best-selling novel A Lesson Before Dying shares with us the inspirations behind his books, how he came to choose the vocation of a writer, the childhood in rural Louisiana that he continually re-creates in his fiction, and his portrayal of the black experience in the South.
Told in the simple and powerful prose that is a hallmark of his craft, these writings faithfully evoke the sorrows and joys of rustic Southern life. They begin with Gaines’s move to California at the age of fifteen to complete school. Missing the Louisiana countryside where he was raised by his aunt propelled him to find books in the library that would invoke the sights, smells, and locution of his native home. Gaines never agreed with the authors’ portrayal of black people: “either she was a mammy, or he was a Tom,” he explains in “Miss Jane and I.”

From that initial disappointment stemmed a literary career that has spanned forty years and includes five novels, which in the words of USA Today reviewer Suzanne Freeman have “made the smallest truths, the everyday sorrows of hard choices, add up to moments of pure illumination.” These are cherished and popular books like The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, and the 1993 blockbuster A Lesson Before Dying, which has sold more than two million copies around the world, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 1997 was picked for Oprah’s Book Club. It has been continually selected for City Read programs and praised by critics as “an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives” (Charles R. Larson, Chicago Tribune). In the essay “Writing A Lesson Before Dying,” Gaines describes the real-life murder case that gave him the idea for his masterpiece.

Included here are short stories that transport us to the rural Louisiana of the 1940s and the influences that shaped him–most lastingly, the people and the places of Gaines’s own past. This wonderful collection of autobiographical essays and fictional pieces is a revelation of both man and writer.
Wide Awake in the Pelican State: Stories by Contemporary Louisiana Writers

Wide Awake in the Pelican State—which mimics the title of Dinty W. Moore’s contribution to the collection—brings together twenty-one of the finest modern writers who claim Louisiana as home, having lived all or some part of their lives in the Pelican State. Each author shares the knack of telling a good story, a Louisiana tradition that dates back two hundred years to the tales told by African American griots and the stories swapped among Mississippi river workers on boats, in taverns, and around campfires.
Though united by talent and place, these writers speak with inflections that vary by gender, race, education, religion, and time spent elsewhere. Their stories are also richly diverse, ranging from Ernest Gaines’s humorous portrait of black culture in rural Louisiana to Tim Parrish’s aching depiction of white working-class family life in Baton Rouge, from Ellen Gilchrist’s acerbically funny rendering of wealthy New Orleans bankers to Richard Ford’s flinty unfolding of a father-son relationship in the marshy netherworld south of the Crescent City. The pieces span the full swath of Louisiana experience, be it the life of a Vietnamese refugee in Lake Charles or the miraculous appearance of the image of Jesus on a refrigerator in Holly Springs.
In addition to their Louisiana-rooted inspiration and highest regard for craft, the stories in Wide Awake in the Pelican State share a deep humanity. These are stories about people—noble and nefarious, some living high and others down on their luck—as they fathom the tragic depths and comic heights of love, betrayal, family, change, and life writ large.
Contributors to Wide Awake in the Pelican State: John Biguenet, James Lee Burke, Robert Olen Butler, Kelly Cherry, Moira Crone, Albert Belisle Davis, Charles deGravelles, John Dufresne, Richard Ford, Ernest J. Gaines, Louis Gallo, Tim Gautreaux, Norman German, Ellen Gilchrist, Joan Arbour Grant, Shirley Ann Grau, Dinty W. Moore, Tim Parrish, Tom Piazza, Nancy Richard, James Wilcox.
AUTHOR BIO: Ann Brewster Dobie is the editor of Something in Common: Contemporary Louisiana Stories and Uncommonplace: An Anthology of Contemporary Louisiana Poets. For thirteen years she served as director of the National Writing Project of Acadiana and now coordinates the Louisiana Writing Project. She is a professor emerita of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
A long day in November

Ernest J Gaines
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman [Audiobook] [Cd]

Ernest J. Gaines
Conversations With Ernest Gaines (Literary Conversations Series)

Ernest J. Gaines, John Lowe
A Lesson Before Dying

Ernest J. Gaines
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman [Kit: Paperback Book, Audio CDs] (CD ReadAlong/Homework Pack (3A047))

Ernest J. Gaines

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman has sold over a million copies nationwide since its publication in 1971, making the fictional character of Miss Jane so real many people dont know she exists only in the imagination of Louisiana-born author Ernest J. Gaines. Miss Jane is 100 years old when she is interviewed by an area high school teacher looking to teach his students more about plantation society in the deep South. Her story is not only a vivid picture of the South before the dawn of the civil rights era, but also a story of one womans survival against overwhelming odds. A stunning autobiography of a courageous woman who won her battles with grace and dignity. Born a slave and freed when she was ten, Jane leaves the plantation of her childhood and heads in the direction of Ohio in search of a white abolitionist who once befriended her. Accompanied by Ned, a young orphan, Jane struggles to get out of Louisiana. What happens in the years that follow is a tale of loss and heartache and renewed hope, imprinted on its aged tellers face like furrows in a russet field. Now, in the racial upheavals of the 60s, Miss Jane brings closure to one generation, and inspiration to the next. Includes plastic kit casing with velcro closures. Kit contents: Paperback book, Audio CDs.
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Related Readings (Literature Connections Source Book)

Ernest J. Gaines, McDougal Littell
The Autobiography of Miss Pittman

Ernest J. Gaines

Miss Jane is 100 years old when she is interviewed by an area high school teacher looking to teach his students more abut plantation society in the deep south. Her story is not only a vivid picture of the South before the dawn of the civil rights era, but also a story of one woman's survival against overwhelming odds.