"Sacrifice time; put a lot of time into your work. If you are a writer, read good writers, whether they are white or black, Chinese or Japanese, or Russian, or writers from Mars or wherever. Read the best to see how they do things, because any good writer can help you. So study hard, and spend a lot of time at the desk. You sure can't become a good writer unless you spend time at the desk." Ernest J. Gaines was born January 15, 1933 on the River Lake Plantation in Oscar, a hamlet in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional work. His most recent novel, A Lesson Before Dying, was published by Alfred Knopf in 1993. It is the story of a young Black man wrongly condemned to Louisiana's electric chair by a White jury in 1948 and of the teacher who tries to help him meet his death. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, it received many honors, including the Best Fiction of 1993 Award by the National Book Critics Circle, the Southern Writers Conference, and the Louisiana Library Association. The October 1997 choice of Oprah's Book Club, A Lesson Before Dying has been filmed by HBO to be broadcast on May 22, 1999. Raised by his maternal aunt, Augusteen Jefferson, who served as the principal role model for his best known character, Miss Jane Pittman, Ernest Gaines is the oldest of 12 children. At the age of fifteen, he rejoined his mother and step-father in California in order to get an education since there was not a high school close enough for him to attend in Pointe Coupee Parish and because it was against the law in Louisiana for Blacks to enter public libraries! Ernest Gaines visited a public library for the first time at age 16. He says, "I discovered the Russians, Turgenev, Gogol who spoke of the peasants. Then the French, Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola. But no one was telling me the story of my people. Thus, a teenager, I decided to write. At San Francisco State University I continued reading--James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. I studied creative writing at Stanford University with Wallace Stegner and worked and worked." Mr Gaines is also the author of Catherine Carmier (1964), the relationship between a black man and a sheltered Creole woman; Of Love and Dust (1967) a black Romeo and Juliet tragedy; Bloodline (1968, re-printed by Vintage in December 1997), five short stories, one of which "The Sky Is Gray" became a PBS film; The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), made by CBS into the Emmy Award winning television film starring Cicely Tyson; A Long Day in November (1971), on rites of passage between the young and old; In My Father's House (1978), the double life of a minister/civil rights leader; and A Gathering of Old Men (1983), twelve men conspired to protect a killer, made into a television film in 1993. Professor Gaines holds the title of Writer-in-Residence at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette, Louisiana. A recipient of the highly esteemed John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowhsip (1993) for his lifetime achievements, he also received a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1971) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1971) On March 22, 1996, Philippe Douste-Blazy, France's Minister of Culture, named Ernest Gaines a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. The award, one of the most distinguished in the field of the artrs, rewards persons who have distinguished themselves by signigicant artistic or literary work or by their influencing these domains in France and throughout the world. In 1996 Professor Gaines was a visiting professor at the University of Rennes in France where he taught the first Creative Writing class ever offered in the French University systeem. As a result of his work, it is predicted that within ten years every universssity in France will offer Creative Writing in its curriculum. Of his books, Professor Gordon Thompson of City College of New York says, "Gaines has written with great sensitivity and insight some of the most significant fiction on the folkways, language and local culture of blacks in Louisiana, particularly in and around the plantation on which he was raised, endearing them to the hearts of countless millions. The incomparable skill with which he describes the strange timelessness of this beautiful country has few equals. He writes about the small-minded and misguided only if he can love them; and of the big-hearted and the patient, he composes portraits with a love so boundless that even as he describes inexcusably inhumane situations, his prose remains unequivocally serene." Honorary doctorates have been conferred upon Ernest J. Gaines by Brown University, Bard College, Whittier College, Denison University, Savannah College of Arts and Design, Swanee, The University of the South, and Louisiana State University. Professor Gaines is married to Dianne Saulney Gaines, an attorney.