Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Ernest Gaines’s short story “The Sky Is Gray.” I was first introduced to southern literature in 1978, when I was a first-year university student in Martha Baker’s Honors Writing class. The course focused on southern writers. I had no idea at the time that I would go on to become a scholar of southern literature or to write A Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the Contemporary South. All I knew in the fall of 1978 was that I loved the literature Martha had us read: Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, and of course, William Faulkner. I was especially struck by Ernest Gaines’s moody, but compelling, short story “The Sky Is Gray,” so much so that the story has stuck with me for nearly forty years. Later, like many readers, I would come to associate Gaines most closely with his 1971 novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Later still he’d gain an even larger audience with his 1983 novel, A Gathering of Old Men, and especially his 1993 novel, A Lesson Befo