SOURCE: McDonald, Walter R. “‘You Not A Bum, You a Man’: Ernest J. Gaines's Bloodline.” Negro American Literature Forum 9, no. 2 (summer 1975): 47-9.

In the following essay, McDonald explores the theme of manhood in Bloodline and compares the collection to works by William Faulkner and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Born on a Louisiana plantation in 1933, Ernest J. Gaines lives now in San Francisco but returns to his boyhood home yearly. He has turned the materials of his own life and the history and folklore of the changing Louisiana plantation system into three novels—Catherine Carmier (1964); Of Love and Dust (1967); and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971). The last is now a major film, televised on CBS in January of 1974. With his short story cycle Bloodline (Dial Press: New York, 1968), these books form one of the most interesting starts toward creating a postage stamp of a mythical Southern...