The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman | Literary Criticism & Book Review

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman Critical Overview

The majority of critics have noted that Ernest Gaines made an unforgettable contribution to American literature with The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Gaines has been seen as a historian, as he pretends to be in the introduction of the novel, who has created "a metaphor of the collective black experience," according to Jerry Bryant in the Iowa Review. In serving as this metaphor, Jane Pittman is the story of rural African Americans since 1865 Her final moment in the narrative represents this one hundred-year period as a victorious slow march to freedom. As Josh Greenfield writes in Life magazine: "Never mind that Miss Jane Pittman is fictitious, and that her 'autobiography,' offered up in the form of taped reminiscences, is artifice. The effect is stunning."

The novel has been so celebrated that the difference in critical views is often limited to the way reviewers praise the novel. Often,...
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