Ernest J. Gaines, in his own words:

"We all know--at least intellectually--that we're going [to die]. The difference is being told, 'Okay, it's tomorrow at 10 a.m.' How do you react to that? How do you face it? That, it seems to me, is the ultimate test of life.

"When I speak to black students about Hemingway, they often ask me what I expect them to learn from 'that white man.' I tell them: 'All Hemingway wrote about was grace under pressure. And he was talking about you. Can you tell me a better example of grace under pressure than our people for the past three hundred years? Grace under pressure isn't just about bullfighters and men at war. It's about getting up every day to face a job or a white boss you don't like but have to face to feed your children so they'll grow up to be a better generation.' "

About the Author:

The world into which Ernest James Gaines was born--on January 15, 1933--is essentially the world which he has distilled into the dense and complex world of his six novels and his stories. The land around River Lake Plantation--near New Roads, Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana--is the land around the Pichot plantation, near Bayonne, St. Raphael Parish, presented in A Lesson Before Dying. The black community in which Gaines grew up became "the quarter" of this 1993 novel, as well as providing the setting and social matrix of his previous works. The author's vision of Henri Pichot's cane fields stems firectly from the fields in which Gaines himself worked as a child. As Gaines has said: "Though the places in my stories and novels are imaginary ones, they are based pretty much on the place where I grew up and the surrounding areas where I worked, went to school, and traveled as a child. My chatacters speak the way people speak in that area." Gaines also has drawn considerably on the mores of black culture and the storytelling traditions of rural Louisiana. The result is a prose that is at once exact, idiomatic, stately, and true to the spoken language of actual people.

A Lesson Before Dying won the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the most recent of numerous awards that Gaines has received. A Wallace Stegner fellow in 1957, a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1967), a Guggenheim fellow (1971), and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellow (1993), Mr. Gaines has steadily been recognized for his achievement as a master of the novel and short story. In addition, one of his novels, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), has become an undisputed classic of twentieth-century American literature and gave rise to the immensely popular, award-winning TV-movie adaptation starring Cicely Tyson.