Ernest Gaines Biography

The National Endowment for the Arts has named A Lesson Before Dying as part of its 2008 Big Read National Reading Program while Mr. Gaines novels are regularly chosen as part of the Library of Congresss Center for the Book One Book Community Reading Programs.
Ernest J. Gaines was born on January 15 1933 on the River Lake Plantation in Oscar a hamlet in Pointe Coupee Parish Louisiana which is the Bayonne of all his fictional work. His most recent novel A Lesson Before Dying was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1993. It is the story of a young black man wrongly condemned to Louisiana's electric chair by a white jury in 1948 and of the teacher who tries to help him meet his death - as a man and not as a hog the characterization given him by his defense attorney's summation to the jury.
Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize the novel won in 1994 the Best Fiction Award by the National Book Critics Circle the Southern Writers Conference and the Louisiana Library Association and was the October 1997 choice of Oprah's Book Club. On May 22 1999 HBO premiered A Lesson Before Dying which subsequently received two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Made-For-Television Movie and Outstanding Writing for a Mini-Series or Movie (South African writer Ann Peacock). A play by Romulus Linney and a Southern Writers' Project based on the novel and having the same title had its World Premiere at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in January 2000 and Off-Broadway in September 2000.

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