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This week in history: Author Ernest J. Gaines was born [1]

['Khalil Gillon', 'More Khalil Gillon', 'Verite News']

Date: 2024-01-17  

Author Ernest J. Gaines, who wrote the critically acclaimed “A Lesson Before Dying” and numerous other works detailing the African American experience in the 20th century, was born on Jan. 15, 1933.

Louisiana author Ernest J. Gaines. Credit: Slowking4, GFDL 1.2 , via Wikimedia Commons

Gaines was born on the Riverlake Plantation in Oscar, Louisiana into a family of sharecroppers. He started working in the fields at 8 years old, picking potatoes, onions and cotton, he said in a 2001 interview. He said he and his siblings were raised primarily by his aunt, who was his biggest influence in life.

In 1948, when Gaines was 15, he moved in with his mother and stepfather in Vallejo, California because there wasn’t a high school for African Americans in Pointe Coupee Parish, where he grew up.

After graduating from high school, Gaines served in the Army for two years, stationed in Guam. When he returned home, he studied at Vallejo Junior College before enrolling in what is now San Francisco State University. It was while he was enrolled there that he published his first short story, “The Turtle,” in 1956.

In 1964, Gaines published his first novel, “Catherine Carmier.” The book was set in the fictional Bayonne, intended to resemble the southern Louisiana in which Gaines was raised. Gaines would later use Bayonne as a setting for a number of his other works.

Gaines continued to publish novels throughout the 1960s. He rose to acclaim in 1971 with the publication of the novel “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” The book was adapted into a television movie that starred Cicely Tyson and won multiple awards, including nine Primetime Emmys.

Gaines’ eighth novel, “A Lesson Before Dying,” was published in 1993, securing him a Pulitzer Prize nomination and a National Book Critics Circle Award. The book was based on the true story of Willie Francis, a Black teenager known for surviving an electrocution attempt by the state of Louisiana in 1946 following a murder conviction. “A Lesson Before Dying” was also adapted into a television movie and contributed to a public debate around capital punishment.

Also in 1993, Gaines married New Orleans native and attorney Dianne Saulney, and the couple divided their time between San Francisco and Oscar. In his later years, Gaines received honors from multiple colleges and universities. In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded him with the National Medal of Arts.

Gaines died in Oscar on Nov. 5, 2019, at the age of 86.

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