A Lesson before Dying | Social Concerns
Years after A Lesson before Dying was published, Ernest J. Gaines is still concerned with the ways that Black people in rural Louisiana live and treat each other, and are treated by people outside the Black community. His descriptions of life in this community (called the Quarter), in the White community, and in the town of Bayonne are based on a plantation community in Pointe Coupee Parish, near New Roads, Louisiana, where he was born and lived for a time. He writes of the divisions in communities in the South in the late 1940s. Gaines moved to California as a teenager and had...
[The entire page is 983 words long]
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