Geared toward students and general readers. The book offers a biographical chap-
ter, a chapter tracing themes of community and storytelling through Erdrich’s
works, and a chapter on each of the novels published through 1998. The chapter
on Love Medicine focuses on issues of genre, plot, character, and reader response.
Hertha D. Sweet Wong, ed., Love Medicine: A Casebook (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2000).
Essential collection, gathering the most important essays published on the novel
through 2000. The book is divided into four sections: “Contexts: History, Cul-
ture, and Storytelling”; “Mixed Identities and Multiple Narratives”; “Individual
and Cultural Survival: Humor and Homecoming”; and “Reading Self/Reading
Other.” It includes three essays by Erdrich, especially her crucial “Where I Ought
to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place.” Students will find the essays helpful in address-
ing all the topics suggested above.
— Kathryn Westh
Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men
(New York: Knopf, 1983)In his short stories and novels, Ernest J. Gaines draws from his experiences grow-
ing up on the River Lake Plantation near Oscar in Louisiana’s Pointe Coupée
Parish, where his family and ancestors had lived and labored for at least four
generations as slaves and, later, as sharecroppers. Gaines, born on 15 January
1933, was the eldest of twelve siblings, eight of whom were raised by his disabled
aunt, Augusteen Jefferson, or “Aunt ’Teen,” who would become, he has said, “the
greatest influence on me, as an artist, as well as a man” (Academy of Achievement
interview). By the time he was eight, Gaines was cutting sugarcane in the fields.
Because his parish did not have a high school for African Americans, when he
was fifteen, he joined his mother and stepfather in Vallejo, California, where he
continued his education. To stay off the streets and out of trouble, Gaines spent
time in the public library, where reading also became a way to fend off feelings
of homesickness for Louisiana. After high school, Gaines spent two years at a
community college in Vallejo, followed by two years in the army. The GI Bill
allowed him to attend San Francisco State College, where he began writing short
stories for Transfer, the campus literary magazine. After graduating with a B.A.
in 1957, Gaines was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship to attend Stanford
University.
Gaines remembers, “There were no books [at the library] by or about blacks,
but I read the books that were there. There were lots of books there, but none
by and about blacks” (Academy of Achievement interview). Instead, he read the
works of Russian writers Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and Ivan Turgenev, whose