- Born
- Died
- Birth nameErnest James Gaines
- Ernest J. Gaines was born on January 15, 1933 in Pointe Coupee, Louisiana, USA. He was a writer, known for A Lesson Before Dying (1999), The Sky Is Gray (1980) and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974). He was married to Dianne Saulney. He died on November 5, 2019 in Oscar, Louisiana, USA.
- SpouseDianne Saulney(May 15, 1993 - November 5, 2019) (his death)
- After living in San Francisco for several years, he returned to Louisiana as a professor and writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He purchased a six-acre plot on the plantation where he grew up, built a house, and restored the rustic church where he had attended school as a child.
- He began working in the fields when he was 8 years old, and attended classes in a church on the plantation where he was born. When he was 15 he moved to Vallejo, California, where his mother and stepfather lived. There he visited a library for the first time. He liked 19th-century Russian writers such as Turgenev and Chekhov, as well as the works of Faulkner, Steinbeck, Willa Cather and Zora Neale Hurston.
- Received a MacArthur Fellowship (so-called "genius grant") in 1993.
- After serving in the army, he graduated from San Francisco State University, where he published his first stories. He eventually studied with novelist Wallace Stegner at Stanford University. He worked in a post office and a printing shop to support himself.
- Awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama in 2013.
- Everyone asked me, "Who is she based on?" I've never met one Miss Jane Pittman, I've met a thousand. [on being asked about the inspiration for his best-known book]
- There were places I couldn't go, things I couldn't say, questions I couldn't ask. You had to work for nothing and take what they gave you. Yet at the same time, you had all the fields to run in, the river to fish in, the swamp to hunt in. ... I was freer than any white kid, and at the same time, not free at all. What a paradox. [on growing up in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana]
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