Almanac of Story Tellers: Earnest Gaines

  Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of January 15th.

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    It is the 15th day of the year, leaving 350 days remaining in 2022.

    On this date in 1933, the American author Earnest Gaines was born.

    Gaines' method of story telling though his novels was to elevate the oral traditions of black voices, and to portray the African-American experiences in the rural south after the U.S. Civil War.

    One of his first novels, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, told the story of an African-American woman who was born a slave in the 1860s, and who lived until the modern Civil Rights era in the 1960s. The novel explored an extensive period of changes in Black life and culture, told from one woman's perspective but encompassing many fictional and historical figures.

    Gaines also wrote  A Lesson Before Dying, which shows an intellectual Black man's discussion with a young, impoverished and mentally disabled Black man sentenced to death after being wrongly convicted of murder. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993.

     A Gathering of Old Men tells the tale of a group of elderly Black men trying to thwart a wrongful conviction of a Black man who, in self-defense, shoots the bigoted owner of a former plantation.

    In these and other books, Gaines drew on his family's experiences as sharecroppers on an old plantation in rural Louisiana. Though he was born years after slavery was outlawed, Gaines grew up in poverty and his family lived in the former slave quarters on the land.

    From 1981 to 2004, Gaines was a writer in residence at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. He was a MacArthur Fellow. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2000 and the National Medal of Arts in 2012. In 2000, the French inducted him into the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres after he taught the first creative writing class offered in France at the Université Rennes 2 in Brittany in 1996.

    Gaines died in 2019 at his home in Oscar, La.