Born in Oscar, Louisiana in 1933, Ernest J. Gaines has won wide respect for his realistic, quietly powerful novels portraying African American life in a rural Louisiana plantation setting. Nearly all of his novels take place in the same mythologized locale around the fictional town of Bayonne, seat of St. Raphael Parish in rural Louisiana. Gaines, who left rural Louisiana with his family as a teenager, was educated at San Francisco State College and Stanford University in California, where he studied creative writing as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Gaines published two novels (Catherine Carmier[1964] and Of Love and Dust[1967]) and a short-story collection (Bloodline[1968]) in the 1960s, but it was the following publication of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971; also in Literature and Its Times) that established Gaines as a leading contemporary black writer. Aired as a highly successful television movie in 1974, it remains Gaines’s best known and most highly praised work. His subsequent novels In My Father’s House (1978) and A Gathering of Old Men (1983) were also well received, and they consolidated Gaines’s literary reputation. Like these earlier novels, A Lesson Before Dying focuses on the struggle of African American individuals to preserve their dignity in the face of the daily injustices and pervasive humiliation meted out by the Southern white social system.
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