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.

Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, A Gathering of Old Men, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Bloodline, and Of Love and Dust are available in Vintage paperback.

Essays

Miss Jane and I

Mozart and Leadbelly

A Very Big Order: Reconstructing Identity

Bloodline in Ink

Aunty and the Black Experience in Louisiana

Writing A Lesson Before Dying

Stories

Christ Walked Down Market Street

The Turtles

Boy in the Double-Breasted Suit

Mary Louise

My Grandpa and the Haint

In His Own Words:

Ernest J. Gaines in Conversation

A Literary Salon: Oyster/Shrimp Po’boys, Chardonnay,

and Conversation with Ernest J. Gaines

Ernest J. Gaines, Marcia Gaudet, and Darrell Bourque