Ernest J. Gaines

Biography

Ernest James Gaines (1933-2019) was born on River Lake Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana — the same land his ancestors worked as enslaved people. He began working in the fields at nine. At fifteen, he moved to Vallejo, California, where he discovered public libraries and began reading voraciously — Faulkner, Turgenev, Chekhov — because he could not find books about people like himself. He spent his career writing those books. He returned to Louisiana to teach at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and eventually bought the land where his ancestors had been enslaved. He wrote A Lesson Before Dying at sixty, and it is widely considered his masterpiece.

Ernest J. Gaines at a glance