The Collections
The Gaines Center's collections consist of various drafts of Gaines's published work, correspondence, production and publicity materials, translated editions, and reviews. The subseries of Miss Jane Pittman materials tracks the novel's full lifecycle from an early, aborted draft to reviews of the television-movie adaptation. The Miss Jane Pittman collection fills over one-hundred folders—about two-cubic feet—and consists mostly of manuscript and typescript drafts.
The following galleries represent only a small fraction of the full collections, focusing on the materials featured in the keyword entries. We've adapted Pierre-Marc de Biasi's "typology of genetic documentation" to organize these page-scans into three phases of the novel's lifecycle: manuscript and typescript drafts, publication documents, and reception documents. See the Gaines Center's finding aid for a fuller account of the Miss Jane Pittman subseries. As you proceed through the image galleries, click on any page-scan to see how contributors have annotated it or used it in their keyword entries.