Ernest J. Gaines
Ernest J. Gaines is Professor
Emeritus of English at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette after many
years of serving as our Writer-in-Residence. His many honors include a MacArthur
Fellowship (1993), Louisiana Humanist of the Year (1993), Chevalier in the
Order of Art and Letters (awarded by the government of France), membership
in The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Governors’
Arts Award, The Louisiana Writer of the Year Award, and a National Humanities
Medal (all in 2000). He is a native of Louisiana, and has lived in Lafayette
since 1984. Gaines's fiction has long been critically acclaimed and taught
in universities and schools for the past twenty-five years, and translated
into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Chinese.
He received national attention and an audience of millions with the selection
of his latest novel, A Lesson Before Dying, as the Oprah Book Club
Selection in October 1997. Gaines's contributions to American literature include
his mastery of the first person storytelling voice, his use of humor as an
essential element of human character, and his major contributions to establishing
an African American literary tradition based on memory of the past.
Ernest
Gaines was born on January 15, 1933, in the small south Louisiana town of Oscar
in Pointe Coupee Parish. In his childhood, the center of his world was the old
slave quarters on the River Lake Plantation, where five generations of his
family lived. Gaines's early schooling consisted of six years at the elementary
school in the one-room church in the quarters and three years at St. Augustine,
a Catholic school for African Americans in New Roads. Raised by his aunt, Gaines
joined his mother and stepfather in Vallejo, California, at the age of fifteen
because there was no high school available to him as an African American in
rural Louisiana at that time. After serving in the U.S. Army, he enrolled in
San Francisco State College and graduated in 1957. He then won a creative
writing fellowship to Stanford University where his classmates included Wendell
Berry, Ken Kesey, and Tillie Olsen. In 1981, Gaines accepted an invitation from
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette (then The University of Southwestern
Louisiana) as a visiting professor of creative writing. In 1983, Gaines became
Writer-in-Residence.
All
of Gaines's books have been set in the general area of Louisiana where he grew
up, and though none of his work is strictly autobiographical, his writing bears
the distinctive stamp of the rural folk culture amid which he was raised.
Although Gaines lived much of his life in San Francisco, he maintained close
contact with Louisiana, the place and the people. He reveals a deep concern for
the land and for the people who provided him with the roots of his artistic
vision. Gaines has created an array of characters, conflicts, and themes as
rich in their variety and in their universality as any in American literature.
In The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, he created a 110-year-old
fictional character and had her tell the story of her people--establishing a
first person voice based on memory of the past. He succeeded so well that many
readers will not believe that Miss Jane was not a real person. Among Gaines's
major themes are survival with dignity, the search for manhood,and a
determination to give voice to an unvoiced people so that they know they have
the power to effect the affirmation of their existence by writing themselves
into the broadest laws of the culture and societies they live in.
Gaines's
reputation as a writer and artist is secure. Equally secure is his reputation
as a man, as a colleague, as a teacher, as a person passionately devoted to his
people and his home state. The generosity of Ernest Gaines in devoting his time
and energy to all the people of Louisiana--and the students in particular--is
legendary. Whether he is reading his fiction for a class of young students in a
Lafayette Parish school or speaking with Oprah on television, he engages his
audience in a way that has a lasting effect on people. In a thirty-year career
devoted to the literary arts he has enriched the body of American literature,
and for the last eighteen years, we in Louisiana have been privileged to be the
major benefactors of his generosity. During that same time, he has helped to
build a strong teaching workshop at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette
while continuing to build an international reputation on the merits of his
artistic accomplishments.
BRIEF
CURRICULUM VITAE
Governor’s Arts Awards
Lifetime Achievement Award (Louisiana), 2000
National Governors
Association Award for Lifetime Contribution to the Arts, 2000
Louisiana Center for the
Book Writer of the Year, 2000
National Humanities
Medal, 2000
Acadiana Arts Council
Lifetime Achievement Award, 1999
Member, American Academy
of Arts & Letters, 1998
Honorary Doctor of
Letters, Dillard University, 1998
Oprah Winfrey's Book
Club Selection, October, 1997
Chevalier of the Order
of Arts and Letters, Paris, 1996
Honorary Doctor of
Letters, Tulane University, 1995
Honorary Doctor of
Humane Letters, Loyola University, 1995
Honorary Doctor of
Humane Letters, Sewanee University, 1995
Honorary Doctor of
Humane Letters, Savannah College, 1994
Commencement Speech,
Savannah College, 1994
For A Lesson Before
Dying:
Southern Book Award for
Fiction, 1994
National Book Critics
Circle Award, 1994
Louisiana Literary
Award, 1994
The Black Caucus of the
American Library Association Award (BCALA), 1994
Langston Hughes Award,
1994
MacArthur Foundation
Fellow, 1993
Louisiana Humanist of
the Year, 1990
Charter Member,
Fellowship of Southern Writers, 1989
Honored Guest, City of
Rochester, NY, fountain named "The Miss Jane Pittman Fountain," 1989
Workshop and Reading,
Kalamazoo Valley Community College, 1988
Panelist, "Male Characters in Black Fiction,"
Miami International Book Fair, 1988
Outstanding Southeastern
Author Award, Southeastern Library Association, 1988
Keynote Address, College
English Association Annual Meeting, 1988
Invited Address of Joint
Session, Louisiana Legislature, 1987
Honorary Doctor of
Letters, Louisiana State University, 1987
American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters Award, 1987
Reading, Modern Language
Association Annual Meeting, 1987
Workshop and Reading,
Deep South Writers Conference, 1987
Commencement Speaker,
Whittier College, 1986
Honorary Doctor of Humane
Letters, Whittier College, 1986
Honorary Doctor of
Letters, Brown University, 1985
Honorary Doctor of
Letters, Bard College, 1985
Honorary Member, the
Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, 1984
Honorary Doctor of
Letters, Denison University, 1980
Board of Education,
Oakland Unified School District, 1979
California Press Women,
1978
Blacks in the West Hall
of Fame, 1977
Southern California
Motion Picture Council, 1974
Louisiana Library
Association Award, 1972
Black Academy of Arts
and Letters Award, 1972
Guggenheim Fellowship,
1972
California Commonwealth
Gold Medal Award, 1971
Rockefeller
Grant-in-Aid, 1970
National Endowment for
the Arts Award, 1967
Joseph Henry Jackson
Literary Award, 1959
Stanford University
Creative Writing Fellowship, 1958
Publications
Books
A
Gathering of Old Men, Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.
In
My Father's House, Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.
A
Long Day in November,Random House, 1971.
The
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The Dial Press,
1971.
Bloodline,
The Dial Press, 1968.
Of
Love and Dust, The Dial Press, 1967.
Catherine
Carmier, Atheneum, 1964.
"A
Long Day in November," Texas Quarterly, Summer 1964.
"The
Sky Is Gray," Negro Digest, August 1963.
"Just
Like a Tree," Sewanee Review, Autumn 1963.
"Mary
Louis," Stanford Short Stories,1960.
"Boy
in the Double-Breasted Suit," Transfer, 1957.
"The
Turtles," Transfer, San Francisco State, 1956.
“A
Very Big Order: Reconstructing Identity.” Southern Review26.2 (1990):
245-53.
“Bloodline
in Ink.” CEA Critic 51.2 (1989): 2-12.
“Home:
A Photo-Essay.” Callaloo 1.3 (May 1978): 52-67.
“Miss
Jane and I.” Callaloo 1.3 (1978): 23-38.
A
Gathering of Old Men, CBS Television, 1987
The
Sky Is Gray, American Short Story Series, PBS, 1980
The
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, CBS Television,
1974
Books
published on Gaines and his work
Gaines’
A Lesson Before Dying, 1999 (Durthy A. Washington, Cliffs Notes)
Ernest
J. Gaines: A Critical Companion, 1998 (Karen Carmean,
Greenwood Press)
Wrestling
Angels into Song: The Fiction of Ernest Gaines and James Alan McPherson,
1995 (Herman Beavers, University of Pennsylvania Press)
Conversations
with Ernest Gaines, 1995 (John Lowe, ed., University Press of
Mississippi)
Critical
Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines,
1994 (David Estes, ed., University of Georgia Press)
A
Gathering of Gaines: The Man and His Work, 1991 (Anne
Simpson, Center for Louisiana Studies, USL)
Ernest
Gaines, 1991 (Valerie Melissa Babb, Twayne Publishers)
Porch
Talk with Ernest Gaines: Conversations on the Writer's Craft, 1990
(Marcia Gaudet and Carl Wooton, LSU Press)
Television
Documentary on Gaines
Scholarly articles on
Gaines
Doctoral Dissertations
on Gaines and his fiction
Reviews of Gaines’s
publications
Go to UL Lafayette Creative Writing Anthology
This
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English Department of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
To
contact us by mail: Director of Creative Writing, English Department, Box
44691, UL-Lafayette, Lafayette LA 70504-4691; by telephone, 337-482-5478;
by
email, mailto:jlm8047@louisiana.edu.
Last
updated: May 1, 2001.