Ernest J. Gaines, who wrote of the inner struggle for dignity among Southern black people before the civil rights era in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and other acclaimed novels, died on Tuesday at his home in Oscar, La. He was 86.

His death was announced by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette on its website.

Mr. Gaines, who spent his early years on a Louisiana plantation, captured the lives and strivings of those he had grown up with in a time of limited opportunities and oppressive racism. Many of the adults he knew in childhood had little education, giving him an accidental underpinning for his career.

“At an early age I used to write and read letters for them,” he told The Boston Herald in 1999. “In that way I got to learn their stories.”

Those stories lent a genuineness to his fiction. His first novel, “Catherine Carmier,” published in 1964, told the story of a young black man who, much like Mr. Gaines himself, left his home in Louisiana for college in California before returning to the South. It was not exactly a best seller — “I didn’t make a damn cent,” Mr. Gaines told The New York Times in 1978 — but it staked out his geographical and emotional territory.