Ernest J. Gaines, acclaimed author of The Autobiography of
Miss Jane Pittman, and other novels about the struggles of African Americans in
rural Louisiana, died at his home in Oscar, La., Tuesday at the age of 86.
The son of sharecroppers, Gaines was born on a plantation in
Pointe Coupee Parish, near Baton Rouge. He attended school for little more than
five months out of the year. But that was more education than his family before
him had received. He would say later in life that his ear for the stories of
his elders was developed as he wrote letters for adults who couldn't read or
write.
In the late 1940's, at the age of 15, his family moved to
the northern California city of Vallejo, about 30 miles north of San Francisco.
He told interviewer Lawrence Bridges that in California he could do something
that had been forbidden in the South: visit a library. Gaines later attended
San Francisco State University. His early writing earned him a Wallace Stegner
fellowship at Stanford University.
Gaines returned to Louisiana in 1963, inspired by James
Meredith's bid to enroll in the then-all-white University of Mississippi. He
took it as a sign that the South was changing and that he could be a part of
that change.
"As I've said many times before, the two greatest moves
I've made was on the day I left Louisiana in '48, and on the day I came back to
Louisiana in '63," he would later tell an interviewer.
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