By Playfuls Team Ernest Gaines, author of Jane Bateman's autobiography and other accounts of African-American conflicts, died of a heart attack at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 86.
Guinness (January 15, 1933 - November 5, 2019) was a well-known American author.His works were taught in the classroom and translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Chinese, four of which turned into television films.
His 1993 novel, Lesson Before Death, won the US National Book Critics' Fiction Prize. Gaines was a fellow of the MacArthur Foundation, from which he received a full-time scholarship for his literary work, and was awarded the National Humanities Medal. And French letters.
"Lesson Before Death," his eighth novel, revolves around the story of Willie Francis, a black man who was sentenced to death by electric chair twice, and is awaiting his death for a crime he did not commit and later became a bestseller.
"Apart from being very talented, he was a good person," his wife Diane Gaines said on Tuesday.
In 1971, Gaines published the attention-grabbing novel "The Biography of Mrs. Jane Pittman", telling the story of a black woman who was born under slavery but who lived long enough to witness the era of civil rights. Nine Emmy Awards.
Gaines later said that Jane Pittman's fairy tale was modeled on his handicapped aunt who inspired him. She could not walk, but she was strong enough to raise a family.
He also published another novel, The Gathering of Older Men, a story about a group of elderly black men who share stories about their lives in rural Louisiana, published in 1983, and turned into a 1987 film.
Biography resembles the novel
Gaines was a fifth-generation farmer who was born on a farm in Point Parish, Louisiana, and was the oldest of 12 children, raised by his crippled aunt who had to crawl around the house.
Although he was born after the end of slavery, Guinness grew up poor, living in old slaves on a farm, but he was not harvesting cotton from the fields.
Gaines entered the nearby school where the visiting teacher came from five to six months a year to provide basic education to the child's pupils, and spent three years at St. Augustine School, a Catholic school for African Americans in New Rhodes, Louisiana.
The education of African American children did not continue beyond the eighth grade during this period in Point Parish, according to Wikipedia.
When he was 15, Gaines moved to Vallejo, California, to join his mother and husband who left Louisiana during World War II.
He wrote his first novel at the age of 17, wrapped it in brown paper and tied it to threads and sent it to a publisher from New York. He rejected it and burned the manuscript.
In 1956, Gaines published his first short story "Turtle" in a San Francisco State University journal from which he received a degree in literature, and after spending two years in the military he received a "writing fellowship" from Stanford University.
From 1981 until his retirement in 2004, Gaines was a resident writer at the University of Louisiana Plaviet, and in 1996 spent a full semester as a visiting professor at the University of Rennes, France, where he taught the first-ever creative writing class in the French university system.
In his later years, Gaines lived on the Louisiana Highway in Oscar, Louisiana, where he and his wife built a house on a part of the old farm near his hometown decades ago.