In the following essay, Hicks traces the evolution of Gaines's concern with black history and community from Catherine Carmier through The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, highlighting the accompanying shift in his use of materials and fictional techniques to suit his evolving vision.

In the following essay, Doyle contrasts the geographical, historical, and cultural implications of Gaines's fictional settings and characters with the conventions of modern Southern literature.

In the following essay, Rowell explores the symbolic geography of Gaines's fiction, highlighting the physical, social, and political significance of the “quarters” where African Americans in Louisiana traditionally lived.

In the following essay, Folks details the thematic significance of the economic and social changes of the New South that inform Gaines's fiction with respect to both the literary traditions of the South and the folklore of African Americans.

In the following essay, Clark illustrates how A Gathering of Old Men re-inscribes notions of African American masculinity in order to create a revised representation of black literary subjectivity.

In the following essay, Griffin delineates the unwritten but universally understood Southern racial code that informs the relationships in Of Love and Dust, observing parallels between messianic traditions and Gaines's characterization of Marcus Payne.

In the following interview, originally conducted on October 22, 1996, Gaines discusses the European reaction to his works, his literary influences, the evolution of his art, the social progress of the African American community, and his personal heroes.

In the following essay, Folks examines the Southern rural folk traditions represented in A Lesson before Dying, analyzing their significance in terms of both the conventions of classic realism and the cultural fragmentation of the African American Diaspora.

In the following essay, Auger examines how Jefferson of A Lesson before Dying both appropriates and subverts the dominant discourse of the white American South in order to assume the position of a male subject.

In the following essay, Griffin addresses the significance of the names assigned to the characters of A Gathering of Old Men in relation to their social status and evolving maturity.

In the following essay, Shelton examines the aesthetics and themes of Bloodline, focusing on the thematic recurrence of how the African American male attains manhood, what constitutes manhood, and its implications for the individual.

In the following essay, Meyer discusses the characterization of the protagonists of “A Long Day in November” and “The Sky Is Gray,” noting the internal conflicts between different sensory orientations that define their respective identities as African American youth.

In the following essay, Papa describes the oppressive symbolism of Christian subtext that informs Gaines's writings, showing the relation between Christianity and Gaines's own perspective on religion.

In the following essay, Andrews explicates the dialectic representation of progress and regress that informs The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, demonstrating a pattern of psychological and spiritual evolution of the African American characters's consciousnesses that counters the forces of sociopolitical stasis and regression.

In the following essay, Roberts analyzes the conflict between Southern black communal values and the developing social consciousnesses of the young African American protagonists of the short stories “A Long Day in November” and “The Sky Is Gray” from Bloodline, emphasizing the preceding generation's role in resolving the conflict.

In the following essay, Harper examines the significance of the father-son theme in A Gathering of Old Men, focusing on the novel's development of figures of speech.

In the following essay, Shelton explores the change in emphasis concerning the issue of African American progress in In My Father's House, contrasting the novel's setting, characters, and themes with those of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.

In the following interview, originally conducted during the spring of 2002, Gaines discusses his religious background and its influence on his characters, themes, and critical reception.

In the following review, Vancil assesses the effect of the ironic point of view on the themes of A Lesson before Dying.

In the following review, Lockhart summarizes A Lesson before Dying, highlighting the narrator's struggles to reconcile himself with his community and his fate.

In the following review, Wardi focuses on the relationship between Wiggins and Jefferson in A Lesson before Dying, assessing the characters's personal transformations and the significance of literacy in accomplishing that task.

In the following review, Upson compares the themes of violence in A Gathering of Old Men with Walter Mosley's Walkin' the Dog.

Ernest Gaines's fiction has been characterized from the first by its quiet force. The characters in his several fine books often raise their voices, but the author declines to raise his. These characters are mainly poor, and mostly black; their lives are seldom far removed from the threat of violence, physical or emotional or both. Sooner or later the violence arrives, and the characters cry out at one another, or to the heavens. Their pain, struggle, bewilderment, joys and agonies are registered wit...

In ["In My Father's House"] Ernest Gaines returns to the fictional terrain he carved for himself in "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" and "Of Love and Dust."… The characters too are familiar; they are the staunch rural types, like Catharine Carmier and Jane Pitman, who meet life's adversities with stoic heroism and whom Mr. Gaines has portrayed with such authenticity in his previous works. All are familiar—all, that is, except Robe...

Ernest Gaines, contemporary novelist and short story writer, creates [his own world], recognizable as part of his earlier experience on a Southern, white-owned plantation and peopled by characters possessing a strength and dignity cognizant of soul—that inner revelatory understanding growing out of black experience…. [A] code of independence is central to the world of his novels. (p. 340) [In Catherine Carmier (1964) and Of Love and Dust (1967)] the new world of expanding human relationships e...

Gaines's strength lies in his quietly compassionate depiction of plantation Blacks in his native Louisiana…. "A Long Day in November," the best piece in Bloodlines (all five are good), is a masterly novella of a young boy, his father and mother, and their world on a Louisiana plantation. There are no technical pyrotechnics here, no violence, but in their place a steadily seen and beautifully rendered picture of family life, alive with the minutiae of day-to-day existence…....

In My Father's House would make a gripping play with its tight plot and strong scenes of confrontation, its Ibsenite central character …, and its central unsettling question, which brings together public and private issues of great moment to the black community in modern America yet which opens historical perspectives reaching from slavery days to the present. The question relates to a profound cleavage between the male generations, between black fathers and sons….