SOURCE: Puschmann-Nalenz, Barbara. “Ernest J. Gaines: ‘A Long Day in November’ (1963).” In The Black American Short Story in the 20th Century: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Peter Bruck, pp. 157-69. Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner Publishing, 1977.

In the following essay, Puschmann-Nalenz provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of “A Long Day in November” and views the story as a precursor to Gaines's popular novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.

Ernest J. Gaines was born in 1933. He grew up on a plantation in the Louisiana “bayou country.” At the age of sixteen he moved to San Francisco, where he still lives.

In 1963, The Sewanee Review published “Just like a Tree,” one of his first stories. In the next year Dial Press brought out the first of his published novels, Catherine Carmier, which was followed by Of Love and Dust, in 1967. With the appearance of The Autobiography...