Voices from the Quarters

""Who will write about the way my people talk, the way my people sing?" Mary Ellen Doyle gathers and makes audible the voices arising from all of Ernest J. Gaines's fiction to date - the indelible characters who inhabit the author's lifelong inspirational territory: the bayous, cane fields, and plantation homes of Louisiana's Pointe Coupee Parish.

Beginning with the author's upbringing and influences on River Lake Plantation - amid the pecan trees and live oaks, the big house and the tenant quarters - this penetrating study offers close readings of Gaines's uncollected short fiction, the early collection Bloodline, and all of his novels, including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and the acclaimed A Lesson Before Dying."--BOOK JACKET.