Ernest James Gaines (1933–2019) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works featured the African-American culture and storytelling traditions of rural southern Louisiana. One of the most significant Southern writers of the second half of the twentieth century, he wrote works that have been taught in college classrooms and translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Chinese. Four of his works were adapted into television movies.
Born on a plantation near Oscar, Louisiana, Gaines was the son of sharecroppers. He got educated at San Francisco State College and Stanford University, California. Among other academic posts, he was a professor of English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette.
Gaines drew on his background for stories of blacks in his native state. His novels include Catherine Carmier (1964,) Of Love and Dust (1967,) In My Father’s House (1978,) and A Gathering of Old Men (1983; CBS television film, 1987.)
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman (1971; CBS television film, 1974) is a reminiscence of a 110-year-old black woman born as a slave who lives long enough to witness the Civil Rights era. A stimulating saga of black history in the South, it is a personalized chronicle of the struggle for civil rights from the days of slavery to the emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Gaines’s other significant novel, A Lesson Before Dying (1993; HBO television film, 1999,) has for the narrator an African-American primary school teacher, Grant Wiggins, who tells the story of a condemned man in a Louisiana prison in 1948.
Gaines’s Bloodline (1968) collects stories of children’s views of adult life. He also produced Mozart and Leadbelly (2005,) a collection of stories and autobiographical essays about his childhood and his writing career.
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Words mean nothing. Action is the only thing. Doing. That’s the only thing.
—Ernest J. Gaines
Topics: Words
Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?
—Ernest J. Gaines
Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything.
—Ernest J. Gaines