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This is a commonly Stocked Item
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| Mozart and Leadbelly |
| Stories and Essays |
| Author(s): Ernest J. Gaines |
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| List Price: $22.95 |
| Format: Hardback |
| Publisher: knopf doubleday publishing group |
| Imprint: Knopf |
| ISBN: 1400044723 or 9781400044726 |
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| * Please call for availability |
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Descriptions and Reviews
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| In this collection of stories and essays, the belo ... |
 | In this collection of stories and essays, the beloved author of the classic, best-selling novel A Lesson Before Dying shares with us the inspirations behind his books, how he came to choose the vocation of a writer, the childhood in rural Louisiana that he continually re-creates in his fiction, and his portrayal of the black experience in the South.
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. |
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| “Gaines is one of the nation’s most im ... |
| “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
From the Trade Paperback edition. |
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| Introduction by Marcia Gaudet and Reggie Young ... |
| 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 |
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| Ernest Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe C ... |
| Ernest Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish near New Roads, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional works. He is writer-in-residence emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In 1993 Gaines received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for his lifetime achievements. In 1996 he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s highest decorations. He and his wife, Dianne, live in Oscar, Louisiana.
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. |
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More Descriptions and Reviews...
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| Mozart and Leadbelly In the early sixties, ma ... |
| Mozart and Leadbelly
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 c |
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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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