Book details ways to teach author’s works

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is the story of a woman, a community and the African American experience from the Civil War through Jim Crow to the civil rights movement. This narrative and other novels and short stories by Ernest Gaines, who died Nov. 5, explore the life of black people in the South, their religious traditions and folkways and their struggles under oppression.

Part 1 of this volume provides biographical information about Gaines and a discussion of critical and background studies of his narrative. The essays in part 2 will help teachers of African American literature, American literature and Southern literature convey to their students various aspects of Gaines’ work and the adaptations of it in relation to Southern literature, history, music, folk culture and vernaculars of English.

Approaches to Teaching Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Other Works is edited by John Wharton Lowe, Barbara Methvin Professor of English in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, and Herman Beavers, professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.