Ernest J. Gaines

Overcoming Adversity

Ernest Gaines was born and raised on the same plantation where his ancestors once labored as slaves. For nearly a century, they had remained in the same corner of rural Louisiana, living in the same cabins as their forebears, worshipping in the same church, and working for the same family that had held them in bondage. Young Ernest left Louisiana as a teenager, but memories of the South haunted him, and he searched the public library for stories that evoked the sights and sounds of his childhood. When he couldn't find them in books, he began to write them himself, and in time he became a master novelist and chronicler of the rural South. In his novels, such as The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying, he has found universal significance in the specific details of life on a Louisiana plantation. Television adaptations of his works have reached millions. His books are studied in classrooms across the United States and read in translation around the world. One of America's most acclaimed authors, and a revered professor of literature, Ernest Gaines lives today in a great house on land that once belonged to the plantation where generations of his family had suffered and endured. From a painful history, he has created deathless literature, an eternal monument to the courage of the nearly forgotten men and women who came before.