Ernest J. Gaines
Ernest J. Gaines was a prominent African American author, born on a plantation in southern Louisiana, whose early life experiences deeply influenced his literary career. Raised by a disabled aunt who inspired the strong female characters in his works, Gaines faced significant displacement after moving to California in 1948. His military service in the U.S. Army and subsequent education at San Francisco State College and Stanford University further shaped his writing perspective. Gaines is known for creating narratives that focus on the African American experience, particularly in Louisiana, where he set most of his stories. His celebrated works, such as "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" and "A Lesson Before Dying," explore themes of identity, justice, and human rights, moving beyond typical protest fiction. Throughout his career, Gaines received numerous accolades, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, and contributed to the literary community as a teacher. He continued to write until his later years, leaving a lasting legacy that includes the establishment of awards and centers dedicated to promoting African American literature. Gaines passed away in 2019, leaving behind a rich body of work that resonates with themes of resilience and cultural identity.
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Ernest J. Gaines
Writer
- Born: January 15, 1933
- Birthplace: Oscar, Louisiana
- Died: November 5, 2019
- Place of death: Oscar, Louisiana
Author Profile
Born on a southern Louisiana plantation, Ernest J. Gaines was raised by a disabled aunt who became the model for the strong women in his works, including Miss Jane Pittman. There was no high school for Gaines to attend, so he left Louisiana in 1948 to live with his mother and stepfather in California, where he suffered from the effects of his displacement. Displacement—caused by racism, by Cajuns’ acquisition of land, or by loss of community ties—later became a major theme for Gaines.
In 1953, Gaines enlisted in the US Army. Following two years of military service, he attended San Francisco State College, from which he graduated in 1957. That year, he became a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he was able to develop his fiction.
Young Gaines discovered works by William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Anton Chekhov, who wrote about the land. Not finding acceptable literary depictions of African Americans, Gaines resolved to write stories illuminating the lives and identities of his people. After completing military service, he earned a degree in English, published his first short stories, and received a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University.
Gaines rejected California as a subject for fiction, chose southern Louisiana as his major setting, and, like the Southern literary giant Faulkner, invented his own county. Catherine Carmier (1964), an uneven apprentice novel, is the first of Gaines’s works revealing Louisiana’s physical beauty and folk speech.
Receiving a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Gaines published Of Love and Dust (1967), inspired by a blues song about an African American who escapes prison by doing hard labor on a Louisiana plantation. This and other works by Gaines are not protest fiction, but they are concerned with human rights, justice, and equality.
It was with The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) that Gaines found a national audience. The first-person novel recounts the life experiences of a centenarian African American woman, born into slavery, who lives to see the inception of the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. An Emmy Award–winning film adaptation of the novel was broadcast on television in 1974.
Years of listening to the conversations of plantation folk led Gaines to employ multiple narrators in “Just Like a Tree” in Bloodline (1968), a short-story collection. He also employs the technique in A Gathering of Old Men (1983), which gives new form to another favorite theme, the achievement of manhood. Twelve elderly African American men, after a lifetime of passivity, stand up against ruthless Cajuns and rednecks who have mistreated them, taken over their farmland, and threatened to destroy their past, represented by family homes and graveyards. In Gaines’s somber moral drama, A Lesson Before Dying (1993), an African American teacher who has difficulty being a man in his segregated society learns to love. He helps to humanize an illiterate teenager wrongly condemned for murder and to convince the boy to die courageously. With a firmer personal and racial identity, the teacher becomes dedicated to educating young African Americans. A Lesson Before Dying earned Gaines that year's National Book Critics Circle Award and was later adapted for film and stage as well. After a collection of Gaines's short stories and essays was published as Mozart and Leadbelly in 2005, Gaines did not publish another work until 2017, when he published the original short novel The Tragedy of Brady Sims. In this book, a reporter discovers information about a small town and the man behind a shooting at a local courthouse.
Gaines served as a teacher in his position as writer-in-residence at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now University of Louisiana at Lafayette) until his retirement in 2004. His honors included a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the National Medal of Arts. In 2004, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation established a prize in his name—the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence—to promote the efforts of emerging African American novelists and short-fiction writers. Additionally, the Ernest J. Gaines Center was opened at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2010.
For many years, Gaines and his wife divided their time between the San Francisco Bay Area and the home they built on the former plantation where Gaines was born and raised. They formed the Mount Zion River Lake Cemetery Association in the mid-1990s in order to maintain the burial grounds of Gaines's ancestors. On November 5, 2019, Gaines died at his home in Oscar, Louisiana, at the age of eighty-six.
Bibliography
Auger, Philip. Native Sons in No Man’s Land: Rewriting Afro-American Manhood in the Novels of Baldwin, Walker, Wideman, and Gaines. New York: Garland, 2000. Print.
Babb, Valerie Melissa. Ernest Gaines. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Print.
Beavers, Herman. Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1995. Print.
Burke, William. “Bloodline: A Man’s Black South.” College Language Association Journal 19 (1976): 545–58. Print.
Carmean, Karen. Ernest J. Gaines: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 1998. Print.
Clark, Keith. Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002. Print.
Doyle, Mary Ellen. Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2001. Print.
“Ernest J. Gaines.” Academy of Achievement. Amer. Acad. of Achievement, 26 Mar. 2008. Web. 5 Apr. 2016.
Estes, David E., ed. Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994. Print.
Gaines, Ernest J., Marcia G. Gaudet, and Carl Wooton. Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines: Conversations on the Writer’s Craft. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1990. Print.
Genzlinger, Neil. "Ernest J. Gaines, Author of 'The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,' Is Dead at 86." The New York Times, 5 Nov. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/books/ernest-gaines-dead.html. Accessed 2 Dec. 2019.
Jones, Suzanne W. “New Narratives of Southern Manhood: Race, Masculinity, and Closure in Ernest Gaines’s Fiction.” Critical Survey 9 (1997): 15–42. Print.
Lowe, John, ed. Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995. Print.
Magnier, Bernard. “Ernest J. Gaines.” UNESCO Courier April 1995: 5–7. Print.
Papa, Lee. “‘His Feet on Your Neck’: The New Religion in the Works of Ernest J. Gaines.” African American Review 27 (1993): 187–93. Print.
Peterson, V. R. “Ernest Gaines: Writing About the Past.” Essence August 1993: 52. Print.
Seelye, Katharine Q. “Writer Tends Land Where Ancestors Were Slaves.” New York Times 21 Oct. 2010: A18. Print.
Shelton, Frank W. “Ambiguous Manhood in Ernest J. Gaines’ Bloodline.” College Language Association Journal 19 (1975): 200–209. Print.
Simpson, Anne K. A Gathering of Gaines: The Man and the Writer. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies at the U of Southwestern Louisiana, 1991. Print.