Ernest J. Gaines

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 1960s. In this woman, Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure, a woman equipped to stand beside William Faulkner's...

This National Book Critics Circle Award winner follows the real-life story of the friendship formed between a disheartened schoolteacher and a Black man falsely accused of murder in Jim Crow era Louisiana. Based on Ernest J. Gaines' National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel, A Lesson...

When Sheriff Mapes is summoned to a sugarcane plantation to find a dead Cajun farmer, he knows who committed the crime....

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman has sold over a million copies nationwide since its publication in 1971, making the fictional character of Miss Jane so real many people don’t know she exists only in the imagination of Louisiana-born author Ernest J. Gaines. Miss Jane is 100 years old...

A courthouse shooting leads a young reporter to uncover the long story of race and power in his small town and the relationship between the white sheriff and the black man who "whipped children" to keep order—in the final novella by the beloved Ernest J. Gaines. After Brady Sims pulls out a...

Catherine Carmier is a compelling love story set in a deceptively bucolic Louisiana countryside, where blacks, Cajuns, and whites maintain an uneasy coexistence. When Jackson returns home to his family after an absence of 10 years, he discovers that his bonds to them have been irreparably rent...