The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman | Author Biography

Amid the worst times of the Great Depression Ernest James Gaines was born on a plantation in Oscar, Louisiana, in 1933. At the age of nine, he joined his parents in the field and dug potatoes for fifty cents a day. During this time on the plantation he was heavily influenced by his aunt, Augustine Jefferson. She had no legs but was still able to care for him and other members of the family. It was this aunt who took care of laundry and cooking for the family, even though she had to crawl to perform her chores. She became the model for many of the women in Gaines's novels, such as the title character of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, whose faith and self-sacrifice would enable the next generation to have a better life.

Ernest J. Gaines
Ernest J. Gaines

At the age of fifteen, Gaines was taken by his mother and stepfather to Vallejo, California. This was a fortunate move for a boy who was to become a writer. The education to be gained in the Californian school system was better than that on the Oscar plantation, and the library, his favorite retreat, was open to readers of all races. But the books he found did not include rural black people as subjects or authors. He read the next best thing—stories of Russian peasants and immigrants. But while their history paralleled the plight of Southern black slaves, he knew that African Americans had tales of their own, since members of his family were constantly telling stories. Gaines began writing to fill those gaps on the library shelves.

At the age of seventeen, he naïvely sent his first novel to a publisher, but it was returned. Not easily discouraged, he continued to write. He also read extensively. Some of his favorite writers included Russian author Ivan Turgenev, as well as Americans Willa Cather William Faulkner (to whom he is sometimes compared), and Ernest Hemingway. His diligence paid off when he met with his first success. In 1956, while a student at San Francisco State College, he published a short story in a small literary magazine Transfer. With this encouragement, he graduated from college, won a Wallace Stegner fellowship and went on to study creative writing at Stanford University from 1958-1959.

He reworked the rejected novel he wrote at the age of seventeen and in 1964 published the work as Catherine Cannier. Although the novel was not a critical or financial success, Gaines found his voice for future works. That voice was centered on the world of the plantation and its effect on the creation of black culture. "We cannot ignore that rural past or those older people in it. Their stories are the kind I want to write about. I am what I am today because of them," he said in an interview in 1977.

Having found his voice, his 1967 novel, Of Love and Dust, brought him recognition. Four years later, Miss Jane Pittman established Gaines as a literary master of American fiction. Since then, he has won numerous awards, including a National Books Critic Circle Award and a MacArthur "genius" grant, and has published several collections of short stories and several novels. A writer in residence at the University of Southern Louisiana, Gaines lives with his wife in San Francisco but makes frequent trips to Louisiana.