After the war his mother moved to California to join her new husband, who was in the merchant marine. Ernest remained in Louisiana to help Aunt Augusteen with the younger children. In 1948, at the age of fifteen, he joined his mother and stepfather in Vallejo, California, because there was no black high school in Pointe Coupé Parish. While in high school he began extensive reading. The kind of people he had grown up knowing were missing from the stories of America and the South he read, and, while still relatively young, he began writing about their experiences. Some of his early models were nineteenth-century Russian novelists—Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolay Gogol—who focused on the lives of rural people. His literary apprenticeship continued through his time at Vallejo Junior College and two years in the army. In 1956 his first stories were published in
Transfer, a San Francisco little magazine, while he was studying at San Francisco State College. After he graduated in 1957, Gaines accepted a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in the creative writing program at Stanford University (1958-1959).
His fiction focuses on the folk culture of rural Louisiana, including the small town he calls Bayonne. His characters are primarily those blacks who work on the plantations, but he also treats Cajuns and Creoles.
This is a free page. This page contains 198 words. This
biography contains 8,524 words (approx. 28 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Ernest J(ames) Gaines Access Pass.
