Diary of Miss Jane Pitman

Miss Jane Pittman Ernest James Gaines was born in Oscar, Louisiana on a plantation in 1933. Of African American heritage, he was a good sport with his family and understood that hard work was a necessity in life. At the young age of only nine he aided his parents in the field working for fifty cents a day. He looked up to his handicap aunt, Augustine Jefferson, as she was his role model in his early youth. She inspired him and opened his eyes to setting a strong path for the generations to come. His mother and step father uprooted and moved to California when Gaines was fifteen. This was a great opportunity for his passion to read and write since the public library was for all races. The lack of African American study or authors pushed him even more to fill the shelves with the history of his race. At seventeen he sent his first novel to a publisher, but this was soon rejected and sent back. Later in his life he rewrote this and sent it again. While attending San Francisco State College he wrote a short story that was published in 1956. Two years later after graduating he studied creative writing at Stanford University until 1959. Gaines has written many short stories, novels, and has won many of awards as well, including the National Books Critic Circle Award. He was given most of his attention from the public after he published Of Love and Dust in 1967. Four years later The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman declared him as a literary icon for American fiction. Jane is a young slaved girl assumed to be eleven years old, not knowing her true age due to losing her parents, on a plantation in Louisiana in the 1860’s. She is given her name from a Yankee corporal because he feels that her slave name, “Ticey”, is unsuitable for her. He informs her that he is from Ohio and that if she ever gains the opportunity to make her way north that she should do so. After the Civil War ends and slaves are now free she joins a group of former slaves and makes her journey north