Set on and around the Louisiana cotton plantation where he was born in 1933, the novels and stories of Ernest J. Gaines conjure a world alive with the rich traditions of oral storytelling. Generous, compassionate, and deeply moving, they portray women and men caught in the vortex of race in America, struggling in hope toward hard-won moments of justice and unity. Gaines joins the Library of America with this volume gathering his four greatest novels.

The Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), adapted for television in an Emmy Award–winning film starring Cicely Tyson, traces the long life of a woman born into slavery who bears witness to the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement. One of the most indelible and inspiring characters in American fiction, Miss Jane is a living testament to the history, hopes, courage, and persistence of her people.

In My Father’s House (1978) is the story of Reverend Phillip Martin, an activist minister who is planning a civil rights protest in the small town of St. Adrienne. When a young stranger suddenly appears on the scene, Martin must weigh the good he hopes to
accomplish against the revelation of the secret sins of his past.

In A Gathering of Old Men (1983), a white Cajun farmer is shot in the front yard of Mathu, an elderly Black man. When Mathu and seventeen other old Black men all confess to the murder, they set in motion a confrontation with the local police, risking everything to make a principled stand against bigotry and unequal treatment before the law.

And in A Lesson Before Dying (1993), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and an early Oprah’s Book Club selection, a local Black schoolteacher is compelled by his aunt to help a young Black man falsely convicted of murdering a white man face execution with dignity.

The volume is rounded out with a chronology of Gaines’s life and career written by his authorized biographer, John Wharton Lowe, and helpful notes.

John Wharton Lowe (1945–2023), Barbara Methvin Professor of English at the University of Georgia, was the author or editor of ten books, including Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy; Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature; Conversations with Ernest Gaines; and Approaches to Teaching Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Other Works. He served as President of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature and was Senior Fulbright Professor at the University of Munich. His authorized biography of Gaines is forthcoming.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.