Black History Month: SF State Grad Ernest Gaines

Monday, February 25, 2019

WBRZ-CHANNEL 2 (BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA) -- After serving in the army, Gaines spent years at San Francisco State and Stanford, studying literature.

“It took me I would say 10 years of writing before I could publish a book,” he said of his time in California.

Gaines published his first book in 1956, and since then he has written some of the most influential writing in American literature like A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying. Some of his work have even made it to film. The success and response from the audience are all because he wrote stories that represented his own experience.

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