The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) - Ernest J. Gaines Audiobook

Written by Ernest J. Gaines
Read by Tonya Jordan
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

A modern classic or vintage contemporary as it is also called.

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: May 9, 2006
Duration: 08:11:06

Miss Jane Pittman. She is one of the most unforgettable heroines in American fiction, a woman whose life has come to symbolize the struggle for freedom, dignity, and justice. Ernest J. Gaines’s now-classic novel—written as an autobiography—spans one hundred years of Miss Jane’s remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantation to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. It is a story of courage and survival, history, bigotry, and hope—as seen through the eyes of a woman who lived through it all. A historical tour de force, a triumph of fiction, Miss Jane’s eloquent narrative brings to life an important story of race in America—and stands as a landmark work for our time.

This is a novel in the guise of the tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a witness to the black militancy of the 1960s. In this woman, Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure, a woman equipped to stand beside William Faulkner’s Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury. Miss Jane Pittman, like Dilsey, has “endured,” has seen almost everything and foretold the rest.

The novel was dramatized in a TV movie in 1974, starring Cicely Tyson.