Gaines, Ernest J. (1933-2019), was an African American author known for novels and stories based on his experiences growing up in rural Louisiana. Gaines was often praised for his vivid exploration of themes and characters rooted in the storytelling traditions and Black culture of the Louisiana bayou area, which he called Bayonne. The central figures in Gaines’s fiction are African Americans of various ethnic backgrounds who seek fulfillment and justice in a segregated society. Much of Gaines’s fiction also deals with strained relationships within Black families or between generations of Black men.
Gaines’s most famous novel is The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971). The novel is designed to sound like an oral history spoken by Jane Pittman, a 110-year-old formerly enslaved woman from Louisiana. Pittman’s distinctive voice recounts a century of social history from the American Civil War (1861-1865) to the civil rights protests of the 1960’s. The novel was adapted into a highly praised television movie in 1974 that starred Cicely Tyson as Jane Pittman.
Gaines’s first two novels were Catherine Carmier (1964) and Of Love and Dust (1967). Both are stories of frustrated or doomed love set in rural Louisiana during the 1900’s. In My Father’s House (1978) examines a civil rights leader’s encounter with a troubled son he had abandoned 20 years earlier. A Gathering of Old Men (1983) describes the efforts of 17 defiant elderly Black men in a Louisiana town determined to protect a member of their community from unjust arrest. A Lesson Before Dying (1993) describes the efforts of a Black teacher to prepare a young Black man for his execution. The short novel The Tragedy of Brady Sims (2017) is a tense story of race and small-town justice in Louisiana. A collection of five short stories was published as Bloodline (1968, reissued 1997).
Ernest James Gaines was born on Jan. 15, 1933, in Pointe Coupee Parish in Louisiana, where his ancestors had been plantation workers. When he was 15, Gaines joined his mother and stepfather, who had moved to Vallejo, California. He received a B.A. degree from San Francisco State University in 1957. Gaines was a writer in residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (formerly the University of Southwestern Louisiana) from the early 1980’s until 2004. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2000 and the National Medal of Arts in 2013. He died on Nov. 5, 2019.
