Ernest J. Gaines has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 23 ratings. The most-rated is A Lesson Before Dying.
A Lesson Before Dying
Summary
Jefferson is an innocent and unwitting party to a deadly liquor store shoot-out in the 1940s. As the only survivor, he is tried and convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, a university-trained teacher at the plantation school, is persuaded to visit Jefferson in his cell. Wiggins is torn between staying in his native Cajun community or moving on. The 2 men gradually form a bond as they jointly discover the simple heroism of resisting - and denying - the expected.
©1995 Ernest J. Gaines, All Rights Reserved, Abridgment Approved by the Author (P)16 9; 1995 Time Warner AudioBooks and Juneteenth Audio Books, Time Warner AudioBooks Is a Joint Venture of The Atlantic Group and Time Warner Trade Publishing
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Summary
This is a novel in the guise of the tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a witness to the black militancy of the 1960s. In this woman, Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure, a woman equipped to stand beside William Faulkner's Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury. Miss Jane Pittman, like Dilsey, has "endured", has seen almost everything and foretold the rest.
©1971 Bantam Books (P)1996 by Blackstone Audiobooks
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Summary
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman has sold over a million copies nationwide since its publication in 1971, making the fictional character of Miss Jane so real many people don’t know she exists only in the imagination of Louisiana-born author Ernest J. Gaines. Miss Jane is 100 years old when she is interviewed by an area high school teacher looking to teach his students more about plantation society in the Deep South. Her story is not only a vivid picture of the South before the dawn of the civil rights era, but also a story of one woman’s survival against overwhelming odds. A stunning autobiography of a courageous woman who won her battles with grace and dignity. Born a slave and freed when she was 10, Jane leaves the plantation of her childhood and heads in the direction of Ohio, in search of a white abolitionist who once befriended her. Accompanied by Ned, a young orphan, Jane struggles to get out of Louisiana. What happens in the years that follow is a tale of loss and heartache and renewed hope, imprinted on its aged teller’s face like furrows in a russet field. Now, in the racial upheavals of the ’60s, Miss Jane brings closure to one generation, and inspiration to the next.
©1971 Ernest J. Gaines (P)1994 Recorded Books
The Tragedy of Brady Sims
Summary
A courthouse shooting that leads a young reporter to uncover the long story of race and power in his small town and the relationship between the white sheriff and the black man who "whipped children" to keep order - in the final novella by the beloved Ernest J. Gaines. After Brady Sims pulls out a gun in a courtroom and shoots his own son, who has just been convicted of robbery and murder, he asks only to be allowed two hours before he'll give himself up to the sheriff. When the editor of the local newspaper asks his cub reporter to dig up a "human interest" story about Brady, he heads for the town's barbershop. It is the barbers and the regulars who hang out there who narrate with empathy, sadness, humor, and a profound understanding the life story of Brady Sims - an honorable, just, and unsparing man who, with his tough love, had been handed the task of keeping the black children of Bayonne, Louisiana, in line to protect them from the unjust world in which they lived. And when his own son makes a fateful mistake, it is up to Brady to carry out the necessary reckoning. In the telling, we learn the story of a small Southern town divided by race and the black community struggling to survive even as many of its inhabitants head off northward during the Great Migration.
©2017 Ernest J. Gaines (P)2017 Random House Audio