Ernest J. Gaines: Four Novels (LOA #383)

"The best black writer in America" (Time) joins the Library of America with a volume collecting 4 landmark novels about race and the legacy of slavery in America

Includes A Lesson Before Dying, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and an early Oprah Book Club selection

Born in 1933, the oldest of twelve children in a family of sharecroppers in Oscar, Louisiana, Ernest J. Gaines wrote novels and stories, set on and around the former slave plantation he called home, that are modern classics—nuanced, compassionate portraits of women and men, both Black and white, caught in the vortex of race in America. He joins the Library of America with this volume gathering his four greatest novels.

• The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), the story of an elderly woman born into slavery who witnesses Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement. A living testament to the history, hopes, courage, and survival of her people, Miss Jane is one of the most indelible and unforgettable characters in American fiction.
• In My Father’s House (1978) finds an activist minister organizing a civil rights protest in his town when his estranged son suddenly appears on the scene, threatening to expose his family's secret past.
• A Gathering of Old Men (1983) sees a group of elderly Black men with nothing left to lose decide to make a last stand against the racism that has defined and delimited their lives.
• A Lesson Before Dying (1993, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and an Oprah Book Club selection), in which a local schoolteacher attempts to help a young man falsely convicted of the murder of a white man face execution with dignity.

A fitting tribute to a still underappreciated American genius, this volume also includes a chronology of Gaines’s life and career written by his authorized biographer, John Wharton Lowe, and helpful notes.Ernest J. Gaines (1933–2019) was the author of ten books, including A Lesson Before Dying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Gaines was a MacArthur Foundation fellow, was awarded the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts, and was a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

John Wharton Lowe (1945–2023) was Barbara Methvin Professor of English at the University of Georgia and the author or editor of ten books, including Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy; Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature; and Conversations with Ernest Gaines.  His authorized biography of Gaines is forthcoming.