"When we moved to California I was lonely, so I went to the library and began to read a lot of fiction," Ernest J. Gaines told Paul Desruisseaux in the New York Times Book Review. It was the late 1940s, and fifteen-year-old Gaines had just come with his family from Louisiana to enjoy the greater opportunities that could be found in a more integrated state. "But the books I read did not have my people in them, no Southern blacks, Louisiana blacks. Or if they did it was by white writers who did not interpret things the way I would have. So I started writing about my people." From that first determination, Gaines has written several acclaimed short stories and novels--including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, the inspiration for a popular television movie--which have brought the history, culture, and people of his childhood home to life for...