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Gaines Lesson To All Ernest J. Gains was born in 1933 on a plantation in Louisiana. He lived there until he was fifteen and then moved to California to be with his parents in California. His move to California is what inspired him to become a writer. He entered a public library at the age of sixteen for the first time due to the fact that in the 1940’s it was against Louisiana law for a person of color to go into public libraries. He discovered the works of Turgenov, Gogol, Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola. These authors were writing about their heritage and Gaines noticed that no one was telling the story of his people. “Thus, as a teenager, I decided to write.” He was also influenced by Faulkner, Tolstoy and Hemmingway. Louisiana is the setting to Gaines works. “Though the places in my stories and novels are imaginary ones, they are based pretty much on the place where I grew up and the surrounding areas where I worked, went to school and traveled as a child.
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