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Ernest J. Gaines
was born in
1933 on the False River Plantation in Pointe Coupée Parish,
Louisiana,
a
hamlet in Pointe Coupee Parish,
Louisiana,
which is the setting of the majority of his fictional work.
Gaines was the fifth generation in his family to be born there.
At the
age of nine, he was picking cotton in the plantation fields allowing the
black quarter's school to hold classes for only five months a year. At
the age of fifteen, he moved to California to join his parents, who had
left Louisiana during World War II.
Gaines did
not visit a public library until the age of 16 because in
the 1940’s it was against the law for blacks to enter public libraries.
He says, "I discovered the Russians, Turgenev, Gogol, who spoke of the
peasants. Then the French, Flaubert, Maupas-sant, Zola. But no one was
telling me the story of my people. Thus, a teenager, I decided to write.
At
San Francisco State University I continued reading, James Joyce, Thomas
Mann, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. I studied creative writing
at
Stanford
University with Wallace Stegner and worked and worked." 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
Of Love and Dust,
The Autobiography of
Miss Jane Pittman,
A Gathering of Old Men, and
A Lesson Before Dying, which earned
him a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize and won him the 1994 National
Book Critics Circle Award.
The novel was also the October 1997 choice of Oprah's Book Club.
On May 22, 1999 HBO premiered A Lesson Before Dying, which subsequently
received two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Made-For-Television Movie
and Outstanding Writing for a Mini-Series or Movie (South African
writer Ann Peacock). A play by Romulus Linney and a Southern Writers'
Project, based on the novel and having the same title, had its World
Premiere at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in January 2000 and
Off-Broadway in September 2000.
Of
his books, Professor Gordon Thompson of City College of New York says,
"Gaines has written with great sensitivity and insight some of the most
significant fiction on the folkways, language and local culture of
blacks in Louisiana, particularly in and around the plantation on which
he was raised, endearing them to the hearts of countless millions. The
incomparable skill with which he describes the strange timelessness of
this beautiful country has few equals. He writes about the small-minded
and misguided only if he can love them; and of the big-hearted and the
patient, he composes portraits of a love so boundless that even as he
describes inexcusably inhumane situations, his prose remains
unequivocally serene."
Professor Gaines holds the title of Writer-in-Residence at the
University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette. He is a recipient of
the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship
(1993) for his lifetime achievements, a National Endowment for the
Arts grant (1971), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1971), France's
Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1996) and was
elected in 1998 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Gaines
divides his time between San Francisco and Lafayette,
Louisiana.
He is married to attorney Dianne Saulney.
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