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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 Stanford University with Wallace Stegner and worked and worked.” He attended San Francisco State University and later won a writing fellowship to Stanford University.   San Francisco State University I continued reading, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. I studied creative writing at

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.