La storia della lunga strada di riscatto della comunità afroamericana narrata attraverso la testimonianza diretta e lo sguardo unico di Miss Jane Pittman. Ormai anziana, Jane racconta la sua vita e la sua personale e coraggiosa lotta per la libertà, intrecciandola ad alcuni degli eventi di maggior rilievo nella storia americana. Nessun altro romanzo che parli degli afroamericani e del Sud degli Stati Uniti è in grado di emanare la stessa perfetta miscela di umorismo e ira, immaginazione e indignazione, miseria e poesia.

Dopo aver estratto una pistola in un'aula di tribunale e aver sparato a suo figlio (che è appena stato condannato per furto e omicidio), Brady Sims chiede che gli vengano concesse due ore prima di consegnarsi allo sceriffo. Quando il redattore del giornale locale chiede a un giovane reporter di svelare la storia di Brady, il cronista si mette al lavoro. Un'indagine per raccontare con empatia, tristezza, umorismo, e profonda comprensione la vita di Brady Sims - un uomo tutto d'un pezzo, che si è assunto il compito di mettere in riga i bambini neri di Bayonne, Louisiana, per proteggerli dal mondo ingiusto in cui vivono.

An old woman recalls her struggle against bigotry from her childhood during the Civil War to her participation in the civil rights demonstrations.

Si può insegnare qualcosa a un ragazzo che attende di essere giustiziato? Ambientato in una piccola comunità Cajun verso la fine degli anni '40, 'Una lezione prima di morire' è la storia di Jefferson, giovane nero accusato ingiustamente di omicidio e condannato a morte da una giuria di bianchi che lo considera poco più che un animale. Grant Wiggins è un giovane insegnante appena tornato nella piantagione in cui è cresciuto. Combattuto fra il dovere di restare e la voglia di andare via, Grant si lascerà convincere dalla zia e resterà per impartire al condannato la sua ultima lezione. Giungeranno insieme a comprendere il semplice eroismo del resistere a ciò che è inevitabile.

“'This Louisiana Thing That Drives Me': The Legacy of Ernest J. Gaines' is a new coffee table book that uses photographs and quotations from Gaines's fiction and essays to create a narrative of the land and people who inspired him, the literature he produced, and his ongoing legacy. There are 30 black and white photos, including archival photographs from the 1930s and photographs taken by Gaines in the 1960s, as well as 50 color photographs. The book includes an introduction by Gaines, an original poem by Wendell Berry, and short essays by authors Reggie Scott Young, Marcia Gaudet, and Wiley Cash. All royalties from the book will go to the Ernest J Gaines Center.

Miss Jane Pittman. She is one of the most unforgettable heroines in American fiction, a woman whose life has come to symbolize the struggle for freedom, dignity, and justice. Ernest J. Gaines's now-classic novel—written as an autobiography—spans one hundred years of Miss Jane's remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantation to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. It is a story of courage and survival, history, bigotry, and hope—as seen through the eyes of a woman who lived through it all. A historical tour de force, a triumph of fiction, Miss Jane's eloquent narrative brings to life an important story of race in America—and stands as a landmark work for our time.

In this collection of stories and essays, 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. 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.

Wide Awake in the Pelican State -- which mimics the title of Dinty W. Moore's contribution to the collection -- brings together twenty-one of the finest modern writers who claim Louisiana as home, having lived all or some part of their lives in the Pelican State. Each author shares the knack of telling a good story, a Louisiana tradition that dates back two hundred years to the tales told by African American griots and the stories swapped among Mississippi river workers on boats, in taverns, and around campfires.

Though united by talent and place, these writers speak with inflections that vary by gender, race, education, religion, and time spent elsewhere. Their stories are also richly diverse, ranging from Ernest Gaines's humorous portrait of black culture in rural Louisiana to Tim Parrish's aching depiction of white working-class family life in Baton Rouge, from Ellen Gilchrist's acerbically funny rendering of wealthy New Orleans bankers to Richard Ford's flinty unfolding of a father-son relationship in the marshy netherworld south of the Crescent City. The pieces span the full swath of Louisiana experience, be it the life of a Vietnamese refugee in Lake Charles or the miraculous appearance of the image of Jesus on a refrigerator in Holly Springs.

In addition to their Louisiana-rooted inspiration and highest regard for craft, the stories in Wide Awake in the Pelican State share a deep humanity. These are stories about people -- noble and nefarious, some living high and others down on their luck -- as they fathom the tragic depths and comic heights of love, betrayal, family, change, and life writ large.

Contributors to Wide Awake in the Pelican State: John Biguenet, James Lee Burke, Robert Olen Butler, Kelly Cherry, Moira Crone, Albert Belisle Davis, Charles deGravelles, John Dufresne, Richard Ford, Ernest J. Gaines, Louis Gallo, Tim Gautreaux, Norman German, Ellen Gilchrist, Joan Arbour Grant, Shirley Ann Grau, Dinty W. Moore, Tim Parrish, Tom Piazza, Nancy Richard, James Wilcox.

From the author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman comes a deep and compassionate novel. A young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to teach visits a black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Grant Wiggins, a college-educated man who returns to his hometown to teach, forms an unlikely bond with Jefferson, a young Black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death, when he is asked to impart his learning and pride to the condemned man

An old woman recalls her struggle against bigotry from her childhood during the Civil War to her participation in the twentieth-century civil rights demonstrations

A textbook reader for young adults features 'The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman' by Ernest J. Gaines, plus short stories, poems, and essays designed to build reading comprehension.

In these five stories, Gaines returns to the cane fields, sharecroppers' shacks, and decaying plantation houses of Louisiana, the terrain of his great novels A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying. As rendered by Gaines, this country becomes as familiar, and as haunted by cruelty, suffering, and courage, as Ralph Ellison's Harlem or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.

STORIES INCLUDE:

A Long Day in November

The Sky Is Gray

Three Men

Bloodline

Just Like a Tree

From the author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman comes a deep and compassionate novel. A young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to teach visits a black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group's reading of Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying. We hope that they will provide you with multiple ways of looking at--and talking about--a novel whose eloquence, thematic richness, and moral resonance have called forth comparisons to the work of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and William Faulkner. In a story so simple that it might be a lost parable from the Gospels, Gaines has compressed the entire bitter history of black people in the South--and, by extension, in America as a whole.

'This is a novel in the guise of the  tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has  lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a  witness to the black militancy of the 1960's. In this  woman Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure,  a woman equipped to stand beside William  Faulkner's Dilsey in The Sound And The  Fury.' Miss Jane Pittman, like Dilsey, has  'endured,' has seen almost everything and foretold the  rest. Gaines' novel brings to mind other  great works The Odyssey for the way  his heroine's travels manage to summarize the  American history of her race, and Huckleberry  Finn for the clarity of her voice, for  her rare capacity to sort through the mess of years  and things to find the one true story in it all.'  -- Geoffrey Wolff, Newsweek.

'Stunning. I know of no  black novel about the South  that excludes quite the same refreshing mix of wit  and wrath, imagination and indignation, misery and  poetry. And I can recall no more memorable female  character in Southern fiction since Lena of  Faulkner's Light In August than Miss  Jane Pittman.' -- Josh Greenfeld,  Life

A Black, who seeks revenge against his oppressive white employers, is doomed when he breaks the most honored rule of love in the South

By the author of A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Catherine Carmier is a compelling love story set in a deceptively bucolic Louisiana countryside, where blacks, Cajuns, and whites maintain an uneasy coexistence.

After living in San Francisco for ten years, Jackson returns home to his benefactor, Aunt Charlotte. Surrounded by family and old friends, he discovers that his bonds to them have been irreparably rent by his absence. In the midst of his alienation from those around him, he falls in love with Catherine Carmier, setting the stage for conflicts and confrontations which are complex, tortuous, and universal in their implications.

Set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s, A Gathering of Old Men is a powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man.

"Poignant, powerful, earthy...a novel of Southern racial confrontation in which a group of elderly black men band together against whites who seek vengeance for the murder of one of their own."--Booklist

"A fine novel...there is a denouement that will shock and move readers as much as it does the characters."--Philadelphia Inquirer

A story of a man brought to reckon with his buried past. Reverend Martin comes face to face with the sins of his youth in the person of Robert X, a young, unkempt stranger who arrives in town for a mysterious "meeting" with the Reverend.