How long does it take to read The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman?
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines takes about 4 hours 31 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 31 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1971. 246 pages, about 67,650 words.
10 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 31 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 31 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 49 minutes |
The page count is the median across 24 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
"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 1960's. 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. Gaines' novel brings to mind other great works The Odyssey for the way his heroine's travels manage to summarize the American history of her race, and Huckleberry Finn for the clarity of her voice, for her rare capacity to sort through the mess of years and things to find the one true story in it all." -- Geoffrey Wolff, Newsweek. "Stunning. I know of no black novel about the South that excludes quite the same refreshing mix of wit and wrath, imagination and indignation, misery and poetry. And I can recall no more memorable female character in Southern fiction since Lena of Faulkner's Light In August than Miss Jane Pittman." -- Josh Greenfeld, Life
Subjects: Fiction, Older women, Louisiana in fiction, African American women, Older women in fiction, African American women in fiction
