Ernest Gaines

Ernest Gaines was born on a plantation, the fifth generation of his family to live there. He had eleven younger siblings, and was raised by his aunt. When he was fifteen years old, he moved to San Francisco to live with his mother and father, who’d left Louisiana to find work when he was a young child. In his mid twenties, he served in the military, and afterwards won a prestigious scholarship to study literature at Stanford University. During the 1960s, he published three novels: Catherine Carmier, Of Love and Dust, and Bloodline. While these works received good reviews, it was only in 1971 that Gaines achieved both critical and financial success with The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. On the success of this novel, he was awarded the highly prestigious Guggenhein Fellowship, and began teaching creative writing at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, near the plantation where he was born. While teaching in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, Gaines continued to write prolifically, publishing many short stories, as well as the novels A Gathering of Old Men, and A Lesson Before Dying, the latter of which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. While it failed to win either award, the novel’s great popularity and critical acclaim led to Gaines being awarded a Macarthur “Genius Grant.” Gaines continues to teach occasionally, though he has not published a novel in more than twenty years. He resides with his wife in Oscar, Louisiana, only a few blocks from the house where he was born.