Ernest J. Gaines was born on January 15, 1933 in Pointe Coupee, Louisiana, USA as Ernest James Gaines. He was a writer, known for 死亡纪事 (1999), 珍瑰曼小姐自传 (1974) and The Sky Is Gray (1980). He was married to Dianne Saulney. He died on November 5, 2019 in Oscar, Louisiana.
After living in San Francisco for several years, he returned to Louisiana as a professor and writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He purchased a six-acre plot on the plantation where he grew up, built a house, and restored the rustic church where he had attended school as a child.
He began working in the fields when he was 8 years old, and attended classes in a church on the plantation where he was born. When he was 15 he moved to Vallejo, California, where his mother and stepfather lived. There he visited a library for the first time. He liked 19th-century Russian writers such as Turgenev and Chekhov, as well as the works of Faulkner, Steinbeck, Willa Cather and Zora Neale Hurston.
He received a MacArthur Award "genius grant" in 1993. In 2013 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.
After serving in the army, he graduated from San Francisco State University, where he published his first stories. He eventually studied with novelist Wallace Stegner at Stanford University. He worked in a post office and a printing shop to support himself.