Charles Latham Gaines, Jr. (born January 6, 1942) is an American writer and outdoorsman, notable for numerous works in both the fiction and non-fiction genres.
In addition to his outdoors writings, Gaines covered the "Golden Age" of professional bodybuilding and is the coauthor (with George Butler, who did the photography) of Pumping Iron: The Art and Sport of Bodybuilding (1974), considered the definitive journalistic work in that field, and credited for bringing greater awareness to a specialized subculture, as well as helping to launch the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
During a long and varied writing career Charles Gaines has published 25 books, among them the novels "Stay Hungry", "Dangler", and "Survival Games"; the non-fiction international bestseller, "Pumping Iron"; and the award-winning memoir, "A Family Place".
The book “Pumping Iron” and a later film of the same title written and narrated by Gaines, are widely credited for having introduced competitive bodybuilding and Arnold Schwarzenegger to the general public.
Over more than 50 years of magazine writing, he has published articles and stories in Harper’s, GEO, Sports Illustrated, Town & Country, Architectural Digest, Audubon, Outdoor Life, Esquire, Men’s Journal, Playboy, Garden & Gun, Field and Stream, Sports Afield, and Southern Living, among many other periodicals, and has served as a Contributing Editor to a number of those magazines.
He was named a Distinguished Alumnus by both The Altamont School and Birmingham Southern College, and has taught periodically as an Associate Professor in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Spalding University in Louisville, KY.
In 2018 he was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame, and he was the 2020 recipient of the coveted Truman Capote Prize for lifetime achievement in non-fiction In 1980, Charles Gaines and his friend Hayes Noel, a stock trader from New York City, had an argument about whether the talent for survival was an ingrained instinct adaptable to any environment (Noel), or a pattern of learned behavior specific to a particular environment (Gaines).