These two factors have influenced all of his published work. The world of the plantation, both before and after slavery, is the setting of his novels and stories. And Augusteen is the model for the recurrent figure of the aunt, a woman of strong character and religious faith whose self-sacrifice makes possible a better life for the next generation. Such characters appear in virtually all his books.
In 1948, when he was fifteen, Gaines went with his mother and stepfather to Vallejo, California, where he received a more thorough education than had been previously possible, and he began reading extensively, especially about the South. He has said that the trouble with what he read was that it did not include the people he had known, especially blacks. Coming from a story-telling family, he began writing around 1950 to fill in those gaps. He found that reading Russian novelists such as Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol gave him a sense of how to write about rural people. This apprenticeship period of reading and writing continued while he attended Vallejo Junior College and served for two years in the army.
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