A Gathering of Old Men Setting

A Gathering of Old Men Setting

The events in A Gathering of Old Men take place in October in the late 1970s in Louisiana, and although the novel primarily occurs in a day with funerals, as well as a trial, held several days later, because of the memories of the old men the novel's sense of the past goes back sixty to seventy years. Beau Boutan, a Cajun who has leased the Marshall plantation and instituted mechanized farming, is discovered killed in an eighty-year-old black man's front yard. Since this black man, Mathu, has never bent to the will of white or Cajun, he is thought to have killed Beau to protect a friend of his, Charlie, from a beating. No one suspects Charlie of killing Beau, because he never seemed to have the nerve to stand up to Cajuns or hostile whites.

Candy Marshall, a thirty-year-old white woman whose parents were killed in...
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