Acclaimed novelist Ernest Gaines dead at 86

Novelist Ernest J Gaines, whose poor childhood on a small Louisiana plantation town germinated the stories of black struggles that grew into universal stories of grace and beauty, has died. He was 86.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards' office on Tuesday released word of his death. Edwards said in a statement that Gaines "used his immense vision and literary talents to tell the stories of African Americans in the South. We are all blessed that Ernest left words and stories that will continue to inspire many generations to come.

"A Lesson Before Dying," published in 1993, was an acclaimed classic. Gaines was that year awarded a "genius grant" by the MacArthur Foundation, receiving USD 335,000 to spend over the next five years.

Both "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" (1971) and "A Gathering of Old Men" (1984) became honored television movies.

The author of eight books, Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish and his first writing experience was writing letters for illiterate workers who asked him to embellish their news to far-off relatives. Bayonne, the setting for Gaines' fiction, was actually New Roads, Louisiana, which Gaines left for California when he was 15.

Although books were denied him throughout his childhood because of Louisiana's strict segregation which extended even to libraries he found the life surrounding him rich enough to recollect in story after story through exact and vivid detail.

In "A Lesson Before Dying," for example, the central figure is the teacher at the plantation school outside town. Through the teacher, whose profession Gaines elevates to a calling, the novelist explores the consistent themes of his work: sacrifice and duty, the obligation to others, the qualities of loving, the nature of courage.

The themes are explored among the tensions of late 1940s and the teacher is the character burdened with the long past and with the expectations of a better future. As he struggles to find a way for a convicted young canefield worker to face the electric chair, he must find how to become both human and heroic at the moment of extinction. Gaines himself found that the use of his storytelling gifts meant more than militant civil rights action.

"When Bull Connor would sic the dogs, I thought, 'Hell, write a better paragraph.' "In 1968, when I was writing 'The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,' my friends said, 'Why write about a 110-year-old lady when all of this is going on now?' And I said, 'I think she's going to have something to say about it.'"