Ernest Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish near New Roads, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional works. From The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman to A Lesson Before Dying and The Tragedy of Brady Sims, Gaines stories addressed the timeless issues of class, poverty, and race which transcend the American South and which transcend America itself. While his fictional world centers on a small rural place in south Louisiana, his address is to universal challenges, to human dignity of all peoples, no matter where they come from. His concerns are always with the capacity to confront oppression with dignity, to confront dissembling with triumph, and to replace the language of injustice with the transformative language of humane dialogue and social justice.
He was a writer-in-residence emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Gaines received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1993 for his lifetime achievements; was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s highest decorations, in 1996; and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004.
Books by this author
