Ernest Gaines’ “Catherine Carmier” at 60

This years marks some major anniversaries for some of my favorite writers. Earlier in the year I wrote about the 75th anniversary of Lillian Smith’s memoir Killers of the Dream, and she also has two other major anniversaries this year: the 80th of her debut novel Strange Fruit and the 70th of her next memoir The Journey. Along with these milestones, 2024 also marks the 60th anniversary of Ernest Gaines’ debut novel Catherine Carmier. I will always have, for a multitude of reasons, a special place in my heart and life for Gaines and work, partly because I was able to meet and work with him during my graduate program and partly because of what his work has taught me, not just about my home state and region but also about writing and craft.

For me, Catherine Carmier is not Gaines’ strongest novel. That accolade goes to, as you know if you read me regularly, to his 1967 novel Of Love and Dust, a work that I argue is the most important American novel of the 20th century. Catherine Carmier is a debut novel. It is a first work. It is one inspired, heavily, by Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and works by others who influenced Gaines such as Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, and more. Catherine Carmier is a novel that illuminates the social construction of race and details, as all of Gaines’ work does, the structural systems of class that perpetuate white supremacy. At its core…