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Article: "What men dream about doing": a conversation with Ernest J. Gaines.(Interview)
- Article from:
- The Mississippi Quarterly
- Article date:
- March 22, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Mississippi State University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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IN 1948, AT THE AGE OF FIFTEEN, ERNEST J. GAINES LEFT THE FALSE RIVER plantation on which he was born and traveled to California to search for an education unavailable to African Americans in rural Louisiana. He briefly returned to Riverlake Plantation as a young writer from San Francisco in 1963 to reacquaint himself with the land and the people, all the while gathering notes for his first novel, Catherine Carmier. In 1981, he began teaching Creative Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, just over an hour's drive south of False River. In 2000, he and his wife, Dianne, purchased a strip of river-front property across the road from Riverlake Plantation and ...