Novelist Ernest J. Gaines has died

Author Ernest J. Gaines, who wrote many acclaimed novels about the struggles of rural African Americans, has passed away.

NPR reports that Gaines died Tuesday at the age of eighty-six.

He was perhaps best known for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Gathering of Old Men, both of which were adapted into movies, and A Lesson Before Dying, which became a bestseller and earned its author the National Book Critics Circle Award.

You can read more about Gaines’s incredible rise from poverty in the age of segregation to successful writer in NPR’s obituary.