Ernest J. Gaines was born in 1933 on the River Lake plantation in Pointe Coupe Parish, Louisiana, the setting for most of his fiction; he was the fifth generation in his family to be born there. At the age of nine he was picking cotton in the plantation fields; the black quarter's school held classes only five or six months a year.

When he was fifteen, Gaines moved to California to join his parents, who had left Louisiana during World War II. There he attended San Francisco State University and later won a writing fellowship to Stanford University.

Gaines published his first short story in 1956. Since then he has written eight books of fiction, including Catherine Carmier, Of Love and Dust, Bloodline, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Long Day in November, In My Father's House, and A Gathering of Old Men, most of which are available in Vintage paperback editions. A Lesson Before Dying, his most recent novel, won the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also been awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant, for writings of "rare historical resonance."

Ernest Gaines and his wife Dianne now live year-round in Oscar, Louisiana. They built a house on land that was part of the plantation where he grew up. We is now Writer-in-Residence Emeritus at University of Louisiana at Lafayette (formerly University of Southwestern Louisiana).

 

Mozart and Leadbelly : Stories and Essays
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ISBN: 1400044723
Format: Hardcover, 158pp
Pub. Date: October 2005
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group

In this collection of stories and essays, the beloved author of the classic, best-selling novel A Lesson Before Dying shares with us the inspirations behind his books, how he came to choose the vocation of a writer, the childhood in rural Louisiana that he continually re-creates in his fiction, and his portrayal of the black experience in the South.

Told in the simple and powerful prose that is a hallmark of his craft, these writings faithfully evoke the sorrows and joys of rustic Southern life. They begin with Gaines's move to California at the age of fifteen to complete school. Missing the Louisiana countryside where he was raised by his aunt propelled him to find books in the library that would invoke the sights, smells, and locution of his native home. Gaines never agreed with the authors' portrayal of black people: 'either she was a mammy, or he was a Tom,' he explains in 'Miss Jane and I.'

From that initial disappointment stemmed a literary career that has spanned forty years and includes five novels, which in the words of USA Today reviewer Suzanne Freeman have 'made the smallest truths, the everyday sorrows of hard choices, add up to moments of pure illumination.' These are cherished and popular books like The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, and the 1993 blockbuster A Lesson Before Dying, which has sold more than two million copies around the world, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 1997 was picked for Oprah's Book Club. It has been continually selected for City Read programs and praised by critics as 'an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives' (Charles R. Larson, Chicago Tribune). In the essay 'Writing A Lesson Before Dying,' Gaines describes the real-life murder case that gave him the idea for his masterpiece.

Included here are short stories that transport us to the rural Louisiana of the 1940s and the influences that shaped him'most lastingly, the people and the places of Gaines's own past. This wonderful collection of autobiographical essays and fictional pieces is a revelation of both man and writer.

A Lesson Before Dying
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Publisher:  Random House, Incorporated
Date Published:  June 1994

Read an Excerpt

In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s. A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white store owner. Jefferson, the only survivor, is accused of murder. At the trial, the essence of the defense is that the accused, a lowly form of existence lacking even a modicum of intelligence, is incapable of premeditated murder. His lawyer argues: "Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this." But Jefferson is condemned to death. Grant Wiggins, who left his small rural black community to go to university, has returned to the plantation school to teach children whose lives promise to be not much better than Jefferson's. But he wonders whether he has the will to take off north or west like so many before him who knew it was the only way to climb out of a centuries-old rut. He is grappling with his own situation when Jefferson's godmother and Grant's aunt persuade Grant to impart something of himself, of his learning and pride, to Jefferson before his death - to prove the lawyer wrong. A Lesson Before Dying tells the story of these two men who, through no choice of their own, come together and form a bond in the realization that sometimes simply choosing to resist the expected is an act of heroism. Ernest Gaines brings to the novel the same rich sense of place, the same deep understanding of the human psyche, and the same compassion for a people and their struggle that have informed his previous, widely praised novels.

 

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
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Publisher:  Bantam Books, Incorporated
Date Published:  June 1972
Format:  Mass Market Paperbound

"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 1960's. 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. Gaines' novel brings to mind other great works The Odyssey for the way his heroine's travels manage to summarize the American history of her race, and Huckleberry Finn for the clarity of her voice, for her rare capacity to sort through the mess of years and things to find the one true story in it all." -- Geoffrey Wolff, Newsweek.

 

A Gathering of Old Men
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Publisher:  Random House, Incorporated
Date Published:  August 1984
Format:  Trade Paper

Mr. Gaines's narrative method has largely dictated his achievement. He has chosen to tell a complex and heavily populated tale through 15 first-personnarrators, each of whom advances the plot in short, chronological monologues. Ten of them are black, most of them are male, none of them proves to be implicated in the heart of the action. They are nicely distinguished from one another in rhythm and idiom, in the nature of what they see and report, especially in their specific laments for past passivity in the face of suffering. . . .{Mr. Gaines} has built, with large and single-minded skills, a dignified and calamitous and perhaps finally comic pageant to summarize the history of an enormous, long waste in our past--the mindless, mutual hatred of white and black, which, he implies, may slowly be healing.
From Reynolds Price - The New York Times Book Review:  

 

 

Related Links

Ernest J Gaines Center Website
http://library.louisiana.edu/Gaines/

Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence
http://www.ernestjgainesaward.org/

Ernest Gaines photo at the top of the page: Joseph Sanford