Ernest J. Gaines: March 6, 1974

The Poetry Center presents novelist Ernest J. Gaines, reading from an early typescript of his subsequent novel In My Father's House, and talking extensively with the audience: on his first publication, as a San Francisco State student, in the premier issue of student-produced Transfer magazine, on his process of writing his celebrated novels grounded in black family and cultural history, and on the adaptation of his fiction to film, for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman, starring Cicely Tyson (the nine times Emmy Award production was first broadcast to television earlier that year, in January, 1974). Gaines is introduced for this video by Phyllis Cummings of the Black Student Union. 

Note: The hum to the early part of the audio during Gaines's reading gradually subsides. 

Publisher
American Poetry Archives
Location
The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University
Date
1974-03-06
Event Run Time
00:59:20
Contributors
Phyllis Cummings
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.

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Ernest J. Gaines (00:19:28)

Gaines says he hasn't prepared to read from his novels, though he brings a copy of Transfer Issue No. 1, 1956, the SF State Creative Writing student-produced journal, which opened with his story "The Turtles," published when he was a student. He notes he hasn't written much in the three years since The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), and proposes to read the 3-page typescript he's brought, what he's written so far of the book that would be In My Father's House (the novel would be published in 1978). 

Note: the hum to the early part of the audio during Gaines's reading subsides gradually.

Conversation (00:36:23)

Ernest Gaines responds to questions from the audience, on his experience with the adaptation of his novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman to television; on his writing practice, habits, and methods of storytelling; on his familiarity with the world of plantations, towns and cities in Louisiana that he depicts in his novels, and his additional reading and research; on the writers he feels himself influenced by and enjoys reading; on his learning from family and friends' experience and talking with them; on his early experience as a reader in the public library in Vallejo, CA, where his family moved from near Baton Rouge; of his understanding of black women in Stein's and Faulkner's work as secondary borrowings from black culture, and that his own experience was direct and not from books such as theirs.

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