Ernest J. Gaines
Personal Information
Description
Ernest J. Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, the oldest of 12 children. His parents moved to Vallejo, California during World War II, so he was raised by his aunt, who was crippled and limited to crawling to get around. His was the fifth generation of share croppers to live on the plantation, and his family lived in a house that had formerly been slave quarters. During the summers, he picked cotton, and during the winters he was educated at the the plantation church. He spent three years at St. Augustine School, a Catholic school for African Americans in New Roads, but his education ended at the eighth grade because there was no further education offered to African-American children at that time. So, he joined his mother and stepfather in Vallejo, California. He wrote his first novel, Catherine Carmier, at age 17, and a rewritten version of it was published in 1964. In the meantime, his first short story, "The Turtles", was published in a college magazine at San Francisco State University in 1956. In 1957 he received a degree in literature from SFSU. After spending two years in the Army, he won a writing fellowship to Stanford University. Since 1984, Gaines has spent the first half of every year in San Francisco and the second half in Lafayette, where he teaches a creative writing workshop every autumn at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. When in Louisiana, he and his wife live in a home built on the plantation where he grew up. His 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Gaines has been a MacArthur Foundation fellow, awarded the National Humanities Medal, and inducted into the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) as a Chevalier.
Books
Mozart and Leadbelly
Collects five stories, set in Louisiana, that capture the joys and sorrows of rural Southern life, accompanied by prose works that chronicle the author's life as a writer, and the people and places that he has encountered.
Conversations with Ernest Gaines
The winner in 1994 of the National Book Critics Circle Award for A Lesson Before Dying, Gaines, whose career spans more than thirty-five years, continues to receive increasing critical and popular attention. In the community of southern authors he finds his natural place. "Southern writers," he says, "have much more in common than differences. They have in common a certain point of view as well.". Through television productions of his fiction - The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, and "The Sky is Gray" - Gaines has become widely known and appreciated. Although focused principally upon African-American life in the Deep South, his writing bears strong influence of European authors. In these interviews, two of which have never before been printed, Ernest Gaines casts a retrospective light upon his long and productive career. Drawn from journals, magazines, and newspapers, the interviews are occasions for Gaines to recall his childhood, his "bohemian" days in San Francisco, his long effort to get published, and recent events in his life - including his marriage and his receiving a MacArthur Prize.
A long day in November
A young black boy living on a cane plantation recounts the events of the day his parents separate and are reconciled.
Of love and dust
When young Marcus is bonded out of jail, where he has been awaiting his trial for murder, he is sent to the Hebert plantation to work in the fields. He treats the Cajun overseer, Sidney Bonbon, with supreme contempt, even as Bonbon works him nearly to death. Marcus takes his revenge by first seducing Bonbon's black mistress, Pauline, and then his wife, Louise. Jim Kelly, the tractor driver, watches the contest between the two men, knowing Marcus is doomed and hating him for disturbing the status quo. Grudgingly, however, Jim begins to admire the young man's spirit as the inevitable climactic showdown draws near. --Back cover.
Catherine Carmier
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.
The autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and related readings
The life story of a black woman born in slavery on a Louisiana plantation who is freed at the end of the Civil War and lives for 100 more years to see the second emancipation. The story begins in 1864 as she describes her young life during the end of the Civil War, and it ends 100 years later as she sets out with a group of friends to lead a demonstration for the freedom that had been promised her a century before.
In My Father's House
From every conceivable culture, men joined together in foxholes to fight World War I -- the Great War that would bring the world together in peace, for all time. Jews and Irish, blacks and whites fought side by side and formed bonds of friendship that would tie them together forever. Max Meyer, a Jew from New York; Ellis Warne, an Irish doctor's son from Ohio; Birch Tucker, an Arkansas farm boy -- even Jefferson Canfield, the son of a black sharecropper. And as these men drew together in their common cause, the lives of their families became inextricably entwined. They prayed and hoped, wept and laughed-and rejoiced as one when their sons and brothers and fiancés came home from the battlefield. But even as the Armistice is declared, another battle rages on -- the undercurrents of racial, religious and cultural intolerance threaten the very foundations of the nation. Will there be any freedom -- any peace -- on the home front? - Author website.
The tragedy of Brady Sims
"Ernest J. Gaines's new novella revolves around a courthouse shooting that leads a young reporter to uncover the long story of race and power in his small town and the relationship between the white sheriff and the black man who "whipped children" to keep order. After Brady Sims pulls out a gun in a courtroom and shoots his own son, who has just been convicted of robbery and murder, he asks only to be allowed two hours before he'll give himself up to the sheriff. When the editor of the local newspaper asks his cub reporter to dig up a "human interest" story about Brady, he heads for the town's barbershop. It is the barbers and the regulars who hang out there who narrate with empathy, sadness, humor, and a profound understanding the life story of Brady Sims--an honorable, just, and unsparing man who with his tough love had been handed the task of keeping the black children of Bayonne, Louisiana in line to protect them from the unjust world in which they lived. And when his own son makes a fateful mistake, it is up to Brady to carry out the necessary reckoning. In the telling, we learn the story of a small southern town, divided by race, and the black community struggling to survive even as many of its inhabitants head off northwards during the Great Migration"-- "Ernest J. Gaines's new novella is about a courthouse shooting that leads a young reporter to uncover the long story of race and power in his small town and the relationship between the white sheriff and the black man who "whipped children" to keep order"--
The autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
"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
Bloodline
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