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

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The best black writer in America" joins the Library of America with a volume collecting 4 landmark novels about race and the legacy of slavery in America (TIME) Includes A Lesson Before Dying, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and an Oprah Book Club selection Ernest J. Gaines joins the Library of America with this volume gathering 4 essential masterpieces. Set on the former slave plantation in Louisiana on which Gaines grew up, these novels display a rare compassion and generosity for all the characters--Black and white alike--who inhabit a world as fully imagined as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Here are: 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.