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Ernest Gaines was born in 1933 on the River Lake plantation in Pointe Coupée Parish, Louisiana, the setting for most of his fiction; he was the fifth generation in his family to be born there. At the age of nine he was picking cotton in the plantation fields. When he was fifteen, Gaines moved to California to join his parents, who had left Louisiana during World War II. There he attended San Francisco State University and later won a writing fellowship to Stanford University.
A prominent African-American writer, he was nominated for the 2004 Nobel Prize. He is known for such works as A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. He is permanent writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, Louisiana.
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