The Ernest J. Gaines Center

Ernest J. Gaines was born on January 15, 1933 to sharecroppers on the River Valley Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. He worked in the fields most of the time, attending school for only five and a half months each year. His ancestors had lived there for five generations, and he kept returning to that land throughout his life. He first started writing by reading letters to people in his community and writing their responses, usually composing them on his own with little direction from the person he was writing for. When he was fifteen, he moved to California to live with his parents because there was no high school or library available to African Americans in his parish, and his parents wanted him to receive an education. He went to his first library in 1948. There, he was disappointed to find that the books were not about him and his people. This gap inspired him to start working on his first novel, which was immediately rejected by the publisher. He returned to Louisiana in 1963 in order to “see and feel and be with the thing” he wanted to write about.

While he never wrote like Baldwin or Wright, he still calls his writing protest writing, citing the horrid conditions his characters live in. More than anything, his work is about the daily lives and struggles of Black communities in the Deep South, bringing a clear humanity to his characters and showing their suffering clearly without including gory events or explicit physical abuse. His personal heroes were those like Miss Jane Pittman, who survived through horrible things and continued to enjoy their lives. His women are strong because of the strong women who raised him, especially his aunt, who could not walk, but still did her own housework and raised the children, and who he credits as having taught him responsibility and dignity 

In interviews, Gaines claims the land is “one of the main characters” of his work, where his family lived for five generations, dating back to slavery, and which was all he knew before moving to California. Like Faulkner, Gaines created a fictional parish in Louisiana based on Pointe Coupee, where all of his stories take place. In doing so, he writes about a place that he knows well, where he knows the physical landmarks and the people and culture so that he only has to create the characters and plot himself. Gaines credits “his people” for his storytelling abilities, and many of his characters are based on people he grew up with and around on the plantation. In his later life, he and his wife bought part of the property and built a house near the cemetery after moving the old church house to that section. Once a year, on the Saturday before All Saints Day, he organizes a group to clean up the cemetery and invites the public as well as anyone with relatives buried there to contribute to the restoration. The Ernest J. Gaines Center gathers students and community members to drive together and participate in the restoration each year.

A full list of Dr. Gaines’ honors and awards can be found online and is too long to list here, but some of his most impressive are the Wallace Stegner writing fellowship for Stanford University, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the MacArthur Fellow Award, the National Humanities Medal from Bill Clinton, and the National Medal of the Arts from Barack Obama. He also held honorary doctorates from four universities including LSU and was awarded the Southern Book Award for Fiction.

UL Lafayette is located about sixty miles from Gaines’ birthplace, and he became a professor and writer in residence there in 1981. Even today, the house held for the current writer in residence is referred to as the Gaines House. As a professor, he created the course for a graduate-level fiction workshop, which is still taught each semester by the writer in residence. Upon his retirement in 2004, he was named UL’s Writer-in-Residence Emeritus. In 2008, plans for the Ernest J. Gaines Center started, and it was opened to the public in 2010, serving as a resource and a workspace for scholars studying Gaines and his work. The Center is located on the third floor of the Edith Garland Dupre Library on UL’s campus. It is a welcoming area decorated with photographs of Louisiana’s landscapes, and just outside the door is an open area where lectures and workshops hosted by the Center can take place. Professors are encouraged to take their classes to the Center, which is also open to the public. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Center is currently open by appointment only, but it expects to return to normal hours when it is safe to do so.

For the time being, only published materials are open to the public, since Gaines considered the writing too bad and didn't want others to question him about it. Unpublished material has always been accessible with Dr. Gaines’ permission, but that is set to be opened to the public soon, following his death in November 2019. To start the Center’s collection, Gaines donated his manuscripts through 1983 as well as some artifacts including his early typewriter and some photographs. The collection is separated into four series: Published Works, Unpublished Manuscripts, Gallery Proofs, and Newspaper Clippings. Each series is organized chronologically, and Series 1, Published Works, is further separated into subseries for each of his published books. His most recent book, The Tragedy of Brady Sims, is not yet part of the collection. The Center expects to acquire the rest of Gaines’ papers. They expect the acquisition of papers, manuscripts, and interviews from Gaines scholars as well as books, articles, essays, interviews, theses, and dissertations about Gaines and his writing .

Gaines, Ernest J., and Rose Anne Brister. "The Last Regionalist? An Interview with Ernest J. Gaines." Callaloo, vol. 26, no. 3, 549 - 564. Published 2003. Gale Literature Resource Center.

Gaines, Ernest J., and Anne Gray Brown. "The Scribe of River Lake Plantation: A Conversation with Ernest J. Gaines." Souther Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 1. Published 2006. Gale Literature Resource Center.

Genzlinger, Neil. "Ernest J. Gaines, Author of 'The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,' Is Dead at 86", The New York Times. November 5th 2019. Accessed December 8th 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/books/ernest-gaines-dead.html.

"Preserving the Gaines Legacy", Ernest J. Gaines Center. Accessed December 2nd 2020. https://ernestgaines.louisiana.edu.