Ernest Gaines Center — UL Lafayette

The Ernest J. Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette is the primary archive for one of the most important American novelists of the 20th century. The Center holds Gaines's papers, manuscripts, correspondence, and personal library — the documentary record of how A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman were written. Gaines spent the last decades of his life in Lafayette as writer-in-residence at UL, teaching and maintaining his connection to the Louisiana he had left as a teenager but never stopped imagining. The Center is open to researchers and hosts events that bring his work back into conversation with the community whose history it depicts.