As Yoknapatawpha Was to Faulkner, So Cherie Quarters Was to Ernest J. Gaines
Ruth Laney’s book is as much about her efforts to preserve what remained of Cherie Quarters as it is a biography of Gaines. It’s a detective story, and she is able to recreate a significant part of a lost world.
‘Cherie Quarters: The Place and the People That Inspired Ernest J. Gaines’
By Ruth Laney
Louisiana State University Press, 304 pages
Ernest J. Gaines (1933-2019), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel “A Lesson Before Dying” (1993) as well as a MacArthur Foundation fellow and National Humanities Medal awardee, is best known for “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman” (1971), the story of a Black woman raised in slavery and living through nearly a hundred years of history, an epic dramatized in 1974 to great acclaim with the help of Cicely Tyson.
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