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This is a commonly Stocked Item
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| Mozart and Leadbelly |
| Stories and Essays |
| Series: Vintage Contemporaries |
| Author(s): Gaines, Ernest J. |
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| List Price: $14.95 |
| Format: Paperback |
| Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Imprint: Vintage |
| ISBN: 1400096456 or 9781400096459 |
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Descriptions and Reviews
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| The beloved author of the classic, best-selling n ... |
 | 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 in this collection of stories and essays.
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. >hr<Introduction by Marcia Gaudet and Reggie Young
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>hr<“Gaines is one of the nation’s most important and prolific living writers and the greatest American writer of his generation to emerge from the South since William Faulkner.” –The Atlanta Journal Constitution
“No one writes about mainstream, ordinary black life as well as Gaines does.” –Ishmael Reed
“Gaines reveals the constant doubts accompanying the artist’s quest — as well as the spirit spurring him forward.” –The Christian Science Monitor
“Words, wondrous and glorious words, burst from Ernest J. Gaines’s heart and pen, describing the events and experiences that led to the publication of his renowned novels. . . . By the end, we feel as if we really know this Louisiana-loving, boundary-breaking author.” –Southern Living>hr
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.>hr
In the early sixties, many of my colleagues were leaving the United States for Europe, Africa, Mexico, and so on, where they planned to write their great novels. They felt that America had become too money-crazed for them to live here and concentrate on their work. I was supposed to leave in the summer of 1962 with a man and his wife for Guadalajara, Mexico. I had been working on Catherine Carmier for three years but was getting nowhere with it. I had written it from an omniscient point of view, a first-person point of view, and a multiple point of view. I had changed the plot many times. Nothing seemed to work, and I figured it was because I needed to get away from the country, as my friends were doing. I was working at the post office during the summer of 1962 when my friend and his wife left for Mexico; I told them that I had to make some more money first, and that I would join them before the end of the year.
But something happened that summer of 1962 that would change my life forever. James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi. Every night we watched the news--my family, my friends, and I--and it seemed that we cared for nothing else or spoke of nothing else but the bravery of this one young man. It seemed that when we spoke of his courage, I felt family and friends looking at me. Maybe it was just my sense of guilt. One night in October or November, I wrote my friends in Mexico a letter: "Dear Jim and Carol, I am sorry but I will not be joining you. I must go back home to write my book. My best wishes, Ernie."
I contacted an uncle and aunt in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and they told me I could come and stay as long as I wanted to. So on January 3, 1963, a friend of mine drove me to the train station in Oakland, California, and fifty-two hours later I was in Baton Rouge. I had come back to Louisiana twice since leaving in 1948, but each time for only a week or two, and both times I lived with relatives out on the plantation where I was born. This time it would be for six months, and this time I would stay in town. I was determined to live as all the others did, and if that meant demonstrations and a run-in with the police, then let it be so. But at that time very few civil rights demonstrations were going on in Baton Rouge. And if the police did show up, they stood back watching but never tried to interfere physically with the gathering.
Uncle George and my Aunt Mamie had a four-bedroom house, and there were other people living in the house: their son, Joe, and three other nephews. Each Sunday we would drive out into the country to the old place where I was born and raised until I left for California. We would visit the old people, who would have dinner waiting for us--chicken, greens, rice, beans, a cake--and we would have lemonade and all sit down in the kitchen eating and talking. Then I would leave them and I would walk through the quarter back into the fields, and I would cross the rows where the cane had been cut looking for a stalk of cane that might have been left behind. On finding one I would peel it with my knife and chew it slowly, enjoying the sweetness of it. I would look back across the rows and remember when my mother and father and all the others in the quarter used to work these same fields.
And I would turn and look toward the quarter back at the cemetery where my folks had been buried for four generations, and I would go into the cemetery and look for pecans. If I found some I would crack them with my teeth as I had done as a small child and I would feel very comfortable and safe there because that is where Aunty, who had raised me, was buried. I did not know the exact place because the grave had never been marked, but I would feel more peace at that moment than I ever did in California.
By eight o'clock each weekday morning everyone except me would have left the house for |
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More Descriptions and Reviews...
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Other Books by this Author
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| The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Random House Publishing Group, Bantam |
| The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Random House Publishing Group, Dial Press Trade Paperback |
| The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Random House Publishing Group, Bantam |
| Bloodline; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage |
| Bloodline; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage |
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More Books by this Author...
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| Catherine Carmier; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage |
| Catherine Carmier; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage |
| A Gathering of Old Men; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage |
| A Gathering of Old Men; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage |
| In My Father's House; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage |
| In My Father's House; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage |
| A Lesson Before Dying; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group, Random House Audio |
| A Lesson Before Dying; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage |
| A Lesson Before Dying; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Knopf |
| A Lesson Before Dying; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage |
| A Lesson Before Dying (SparkNotes Literature Guide); by Gaines, Ernest J.; Spark, SparkNotes |
| A Long Day in November; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Ig Publishing, Lizzie Skurnick Books |
| My Grandpa and the Haint; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage |
| Of Love and Dust; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage |
| Of Love and Dust; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage |
| The Tragedy of Brady Sims; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage |
| The Tragedy of Brady Sims; by Gaines, Ernest J.; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage |
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