Ernest J. Gaines
Ernest J. Gaines was born on January 15, 1933 at a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish near New Roads, Louisiana, which was the Bayonne of all his fictional works. He died in 2019 at his home in Oscar, Louisiana.
A Lesson Before Dying won the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. A Wallace Stegner fellow in 1957, a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1967), a Guggenheim fellow (1971), and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellow (1993), Mr. Gaines was steadily recognized for his achievement as a master of the novel and short story. His novel, A Lesson Before Dying, is regularly included in high school English classes. In addition, one of his novels, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), has become an undisputed classic of twentieth-century American literature and gave rise to the immensely popular, award-winning TV-movie adaptation starring Cicely Tyson.
“I think I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have learned by reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crying, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie’s big band—all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature. But the rural blues, maybe because of my background, is my choice in music.”