Ernest James Gaines was born January 15, 1933, on River Lake Plantation in Oscar, a small town in Pointe Coupee Parish, near New Roads, Louisiana. The oldest of twelve children, he was raised by his great-aunt, Augusteen Jefferson, who provided the inspiration for Miss Jane Pittman, as well as other strong black female characters, such as Miss Emma and Tante Lou in Lesson. Gaines' birthplace serves as the model for his fictional world of Bayonne and St. Raphael Parish. With the exception of his fourth novel, In My Father's House, all of Gaines' fictional work is set in Bayonne. Although he has spent much of his life since age fifteen in San Francisco, he writes exclusively about life in the South. He is perhaps best known for his 1971 novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which was made into a TV movie and won several Emmys. In May 1999, HBO debuted its made-for-television movie of A Lesson Before Dying.
Growing up in Louisiana and attending rural schools, Gaines began working in the fields, earning fifty cents a day, when he was eight years old. In 1945, he started attending St. Augustine Middle School for Catholic African-American children, in nearby New Roads, Louisiana, and became active in staging plays for the local church. Gaines left Louisiana in 1948 to join his mother and stepfather in Vallejo, California. In 1949, he wrote an early version of his novel Catherine Carmier and submitted it to a New York publisher, who rejected it. Following high school graduation in 1951, he attended and graduated from Vallejo Junior College (1953). He then served two years in the United States Army.
