Ernest j gaines biography

Ernest J. Gaines was born on January 15, 1933 on River Lake Plantation near Oscar, Louisiana, in Point Coupee Parish. His parents, Manuel and Adrienne worked as sharecroppers on the same plantation their ancestors had labored as slaves.

Ernest was the oldest of seven children Adrienne had with Manuel Gaines, who abandoned the family in 1941 when Ernest was eight years old. Adrienne remarried and had five more children with her new husband, Raphael Norbert Colar, Sr.

In 1948, at the age of fifteen, Gaines moved from southern Louisiana’s bayou country to Vallejo, California to join his mother and stepfather, who had relocated to California after World War II in search of work.

In California, Gaines took advantage of educational opportunities he had been denied in Louisiana and graduated from high school in 1951. After graduation from Vallejo Junior College in 1953, Gaines was drafted into the U.S.

Army, where he spent the next two years serving in both the U.S. and Guam.

Upon hi