This section contains 3,785 words (approx. 13 pages at 300 words per page) |
by Ernest J. Gaines
In the fall of 1962, surrounded by more than 2,000 jeering white protesters, James Meredith entered the University of Mississippi as its first African American student. This event, a landmark in United States history, was also a turning point in the life of the then twenty-nine-year-old Ernest Gaines. At the time an aspiring writer in San Francisco, California, Gaines said to himself, "if James Meredith can go through all this-not only for himself, but for his race-, [then I] should go back to the source that I [am] trying to write about" (Gaines in Babb, p. 5). This source, rural Louisiana-where Gaines had been born in 1933 and was raised until age fifteen-is the setting for his novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Narrated by a 110-year-old former slave, the novel tells the long story of her...
This section contains 3,785 words (approx. 13 pages at 300 words per page) |