Keys to the Archive: A Lesson Before Dying

The Collections

The Gaines Center's collections consist of various drafts of Gaines's published work, correspondence, production and publicity materials, translated editions, and reviews. The subseries of A Lesson Before Dying materials tracks the novel's lifecycle from an early manuscript drafts to publication documents, including several drafts with editorial notes. One typescript draft features editorial notes with Gaines's responses. The occasional moment of dramatic exchange between editor and author offers insight into how Gaines navigated expectations of his writing. In one note, featured below, Gaines insists on emphasizing segregation as a structuring force for small town life in 1948 Louisiana. In another, he reminds his editor that poverty can coexist with etiquette. These exchanges in the margins illustrate how, even at the apex of his career, Gaines represented his experience of Louisiana in ways others struggled to recognize.

The collection of materials related to A Lesson fills thirty-eight folders—over a cubic foot—and consists mostly of manuscript and typescript drafts along with two sets of galley proofs. The following galleries represent only a small fraction of the full collections, focusing on the materials featured in the keyword entries. We've adapted Pierre-Marc de Biasi's "typology of genetic documentation" to organize these page-scans into two phases of the novel's lifecycle: typescript drafts and publication documents. See the Gaines Center's finding aid for a fuller account of the subseries for A Lesson. As you proceed through the image galleries, click on any page-scan to see how contributors have annotated it or used it in their keyword entries.

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