Ernest J. Gaines is one of the best known of contemporary black writers. He received popular and critical recognition for the publication and subsequent television production of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. His importance in this and other...

Ernest J. Gaines is one of the best-known of contemporary black writers. He received popular and critical recognition for the publication and subsequent television production of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. His importance in this and other...

[This entry was updated by Keith E. Byerman (Indiana State University) from his entry in DLB 152: American Novelists Since World War II, Fourth Series.] Ernest J. Gaines has since the publication of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman in 1971...

"When we moved to California I was lonely, so I went to the library and began to read a lot of fiction," Ernest J. Gaines told Paul Desruisseaux in the New York Times Book Review. It was the late 1940s, and fifteen-year-old Gaines had just come with...

Ernest J. Gaines novelist and short story writer, was born to Manuel and Adrienne J. (Colar) Gaines on 15 January 1933 in the bayou country near Oscar, Louisiana, which lies about twenty-five miles northwest of Baton Rouge in Pointe Coupee parish. His...