A Lesson Before Dying author Ernest Gaines

Novelist Ernest J. Gaines, whose poor childhood in a small Louisiana plantation town germinated the stories of black struggles that grew into universal tales of grace and beauty, has died aged 86.

The Louisiana governor’s office on Tuesday released news of his death.

A Lesson Before Dying, published in 1993, was an acclaimed classic.

Gaines that year was awarded a “genius grant” by the MacArthur Foundation, receiving 335,000 dollars (£260,000) to spend over the next five years.

Both The Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) and A Gathering Of Old Men (1984) became television movies.

The author of eight books, Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish and his first writing experience was writing letters for illiterate workers who asked him to embellish their news.

Bayonne, the setting for Gaines’ fiction, was actually New Roads, Louisiana, which Gaines left for California when he was 15.

Although books were denied him throughout his childhood because of Louisiana’s strict segregation, he found the life surrounding him rich enough to recollect in story after story.

In A Lesson Before Dying, for example, the central figure is the teacher at the plantation school outside town.

Through the teacher, whose profession Gaines elevates to a calling, the novelist explores the consistent themes of his work: sacrifice and duty, obligation, the qualities of loving, and the nature of courage.

A Lesson Before Dying took seven years to write. “I work five days a week, just like a regular job. I get up in the morning, do a little exercise, eat a little breakfast. I’m at my desk by nine in the morning, work until three with a little break for lunch,” he said.

Novelist Ernest J. Gaines.