Ernest J. Gaines is a highly acclaimed American literary fiction author, best known for his intriguing works of fiction. Born on January 15, 1933, in Louisiana, Gaines was raised in a sharecropping family and began picking cotton in the fields at the age of nine. He only attended school for five or six months a year, and when he was fifteen, he moved to California to join his mother and stepfather, as there was no high school for African Americans in his Louisiana parish. It was in California that Gaines began writing.
Gaines' writing career took off after he attended San Francisco State University, served in the army, and won a writing fellowship to Stanford University. His works have been taught in college classrooms and translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Chinese. Four of his works have been made into television movies, and his 1993 novel, "A Lesson Before Dying," won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Gaines has been recognized for his contributions to literature with numerous awards, including being a MacArthur Foundation fellow, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, awarded the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts, and inducted into the French Order of Arts and Letters as a Chevalier.