Emest J. Gaines was born January 15, 1933, in Oscar, Louisiana, and began his life among cotton pickers in the old slaves' quarters at River Lake Plantation. Although he moved as a teenager to California and now lives most of the year in San Francisco, Gaines returns in real life each year and repeatedly in his fiction to southern Louisiana. Following the highly successful The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, (also covered in Literature and Its Times), A Gathering of Old Men continues the exploration of race, gender, and color central to Gaines's writing.
Agricultural revolution in the South. A Gathering of Old Men takes place on a former Southern sugarcane plantation run by a white man, Marshall, and his daughter, Candy. The only people left on the plantation seem to be the elderly: "[t]he young ones had all gone away" observes one character (Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men, p. 58). In fact, they had gone away from farms all over the South in droves; between 1940 and 1980, statistics show that around 14 million Southerners left farms for cities, and Southern small farm life virtually disappeared.
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