A Study Guide for Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Ernest Gaines's "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535835190

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The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

Ernest J. Gaines

1971

Introduction

Heralded by some as the best African American author writing in America today, Ernest James Gaines is best known and celebrated for his novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. As a black writer, Gaines has taken full advantage of African American culture by writing stories about rural Louisiana. In doing so, Gaines has made himself a country-boy writer of folk tales more grown than made. These stories tell of the struggles of blacks to make a living in a land that has not championed the rights of all its people.

The story of Miss Jane Pittman is a supposed interview with a woman who is 110 years old. She has witnessed and been a part of the history of black America since the end of the Civil War. She tells her story to the persistent recorder in her own words and with humor. This editor admits that he restructured the narrative so it would be more accessible to a novel reader but he tried to maintain, as much as possible, her voice. A triumph in American literature, the subject of the novel has been taken to the heart of its readers, and was made into an Emmy Award-winning television movie.

Author Biography

Amid the worst times of the Great Depression, Ernest James Gaines was born on a plantation in Oscar, Louisiana, in 1933. At the age of nine, he joined his parents in the field and dug potatoes for fifty cents a day. During this time on the plantation he was heavily influenced by his aunt, Augustine Jefferson. She had no legs but was still able to care for him and other members of the family. It was this aunt who took care of laundry and cooking for the family, even though she had to crawl to perform her chores. She became the model for many of the women in Gaines's novels, such as the title character of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, whose faith and self-sacrifice would enable the next generation to have a better life.

At the age of fifteen, Gaines was taken by his mother and stepfather to Vallejo, California. This was a fortunate move for a boy who was to become a writer. The education to be gained in the Californian school system was better than that on the Oscar plantation, and the library, his favorite retreat, was open to readers of all races. But the books he found did not include rural black people as subjects or authors. He read the next best thing— stories of Russian peasants and immigrants. But while their history paralleled the plight of Southern black slaves, he knew that African Americans had tales of their own, since members of his family were constantly telling stories. Gaines began writing to fill those gaps on the library shelves.

At the age of seventeen, he naively sent his first novel to a publisher, but it was returned. Not easily discouraged, he continued to write. He also read extensively. Some of his favorite writers included Russian author Ivan Turgenev, as well as Americans Willa Cather, William Faulkner (to whom he is sometimes compared), and Ernest Hemingway. His diligence paid off when he met with his first success. In 1956, while a student at San Francisco State College, he published a short story in a small literary magazine called Transfer. With this encouragement, he graduated from college, won a Wallace Stegner fellowship and went on to study creative writing