Ernest James Gaines was an acclaimed American author, renowned for his vivid portrayals of the African American experience. Born on January 15, 1933, into a sharecropping family, Gaines's early life was marked by hardships. By the age of nine, he was already working in the cotton fields, and his education was limited to only five or six months a year due to the lack of a high school for African Americans in his Louisiana parish.

In search of better opportunities, Gaines moved to California at the age of fifteen to join his mother and stepfather. It was in California that his journey as a writer began. Gaines attended San Francisco State University, served in the army, and later won a writing fellowship to Stanford University. His works, which have been translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Chinese, explore themes of dignity, human rights, and the search for identity.

Among his notable achievements, Gaines's 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. He was a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and his contributions to literature and the humanities were recognized with the National Humanities Medal, the National Medal of Arts, and induction into the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) as a Chevalier. Gaines was also inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, further cementing his legacy as a pivotal figure in American literature.