A Gathering of Old Men Social Concerns

A Gathering of Old Men Social Concerns

Fiction by Ernest J. Gaines interprets the layers in the society of rural life in Louisiana. The setting for this novel, the quarters on the Marshall plantation, the town of Bayonne, and the area where the Cajun population lives, is based on Pointe Coupee Parish in Louisiana, where Gaines was born and lived until he was about fifteen. What can be learned from the older generations, what can be handed on to the next generation, and how the history of the people influences all lives are of concern to Gaines in A Gathering of Old Men. In Christian Science Monitor, Sam Cornish writes that the "characters—both black and white— understand that, before the close of the novel, the new South must confront the old, and all will be irrevocably changed." Social change and how it comes about, peacefully or violently, and what this change does to the people who bring...
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