Ernest James Gaines

1
Ernest James Gaines

• A Lesson Before Dying

2
Authors Background

• Ernest James Gaines was born on January 15, 1933
  on the River Lake Plantation in Pointe Coupee
  Parish, Louisiana, which is the setting for most
  of his fiction.

3

• He was the fifth generation in his family to be
  born there.
• Gaines is the oldest of 12 children.
• At the age of 9, he was picking cotton in the
  fields.

4

• He was only allowed to attend school 5 months per
  year.
• When he was 15, Gaines moved to California to
  join his mother and step-father.

5

• He continued his education there since there was
  not a high school he could attend in Louisiana.
• He also left because it was against the law in
  Louisiana in the 1940s for African Americans to
  enter public libraries.

6

• In California, Gaines visited a public library
  for the first time at age 16 where his love of
  great literature and authors flourished.

7

• He attended San Francisco State University and
  later won a writing fellowship to Stanford
  University.

8

• During this time, he also read novels dealing
  with life in the American South which he found
  untrue and unreal.

9

• In 1957, Gaines committed himself to the idea of
  becoming a professional writer in order to truly
  write about what he knows and feels in regards to
  the South.

10

• Gaines published his first story in 1956.
• Since then he has written 8 books of fiction,
  including A Lesson Before Dying.

11

• A Lesson Before Dying won, in 1994, the Best
  Fiction Award and was the October 1997 choice of
  Oprahs Book Club. It was also nominated for a
  Pulitzer Prize.

12

• Gainess novels are set in the plantations of the
  deep South and tackle issues of manhood for men,
  the breakdown in personal relationships, and
  illustrates the 30 years before the civil rights
  era.

13

• His work also explores universal themes such as
  the conflict between tradition and change,
  relationships between father and son, and the
  importance of maintaining dignity.

14
A Lesson Before Dying

• The novel is set in a rural Cajun community in
  1940s Louisiana.
• A white shopkeeper has died during a robbery
  attempt.

15

• Jefferson, a young black man, is in jail awaiting
  execution for the murder he did not commit.

16

• Although this is a fictional novel, this story
  addresses issues that Gaines fought with on a
  daily basis.

17

• Being a black man and growing up in the brutal
  South was a life of hardship that Gaines felt
  compelled to write about.

18

• A Lesson Before Dying is a story for all ages and
  can be associated with the problems of inequality
  that we still face in the 21st century.

19

• Now, Gaines divides his time between San
  Francisco and Lafayette, Louisiana, where he is a
  writer in residence at the University of
  Southwestern Louisiana.