Ernest J. Gaines

Ernest J. Gaines was a novelist, short story writer, and teacher. Born to a sharecropping family, Ernest James Gaines was picking cotton in the fields by age nine and only attended school five or six months a year. When he was fifteen, he moved to California to join his mother and stepfather, because his Louisiana parish had no high school for African Americans. It was in California that he began writing. He attended San Francisco State University, served in the army, and won a writing fellowship to Stanford University. Gaines was a MacArthur Foundation fellow, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, awarded the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts, and inducted into the French Order of Arts and Letters as a Chevalier.