About the Author

Ernest J. Gaines's 1993 novel A Lesson Before Dying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and was an Oprah Book Club pick. Gaines has been a MacArthur Foundation fellow, awarded the National Humanities Medal, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and inducted into the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) as a Chevalier. He lives in Oscar, Louisiana with his wife.