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 erodes the old world of love for the land and the acceptance of social and economic stratification. The characters caught up in this movement must make choices. Gaines concerns himself more with how they handle their decisions than with the rightness of their decisions—more often than not predetermined by social changes over which the single individual has little control. In the face of polarization, Gaines's characters demonstrate a human dignity and pride.

In Catherine...