His first published short stories appeared in 1956 in
Transfer, a little San Francisco magazine, while he was a student at San Francisco State College, from which he was graduated in 1957. He took advantage of a Wallace Stegner award to study in the creative writing program at Stanford University during the 1958-1959 academic year, and his serious professional writing efforts began.
His novels and short stories focus on the folkways of rural Louisiana. They capture the languages and mores of the blacks, Cajuns, and Creoles who make up the population of mythical Bayonne and the surrounding plantation country. The tales are centrally populated by the aunt figures, older, usually religious women who have seen and endured much. In the process, they have accommodated themselves to existing conditions, and they are distrustful of those who advocate change, even if that change is intended to improve conditions for blacks. Gaines's attitude toward these women is ambivalent: he admires their endurance, their strength of character, and their accumulated folk wisdom, but he also recognizes the need for change in society.
He makes it clear that reform is essential through his depictions of whites and the racist social order they have created.
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