News from Quarry Farm

Gretchen Sharlow

Elmira College is pleased to announce that Dr. Mary Ann Wilson will teach a three‑week graduate course entitled Mark Twain's Legacies—Jean Stafford, Kaye Gibbons, Ernest Gaines, July 19–August 5, 1999. The class will meet at Quarry Farm Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.

This course will treat three quite different writers who show the far‑reaching and continuing influence of Mark Twain: Jean Stafford, a Westerner transplanted to the East; Kaye Gibbons, a contemporary white Southerner from North Carolina; and Ernest Gaines, an African American Southerner who grew up in a small Cajun‑Creole community between Lafayette and Baton Rouge. Despite their seemingly disparate backgrounds, all three twentieth‑century American writers show the influence of and have acknowledged their identity, their fidelity to American folkways and vernacular speech, and in the case of Gibbons and Gaines, the honest and unsentimental treatment of Southern race relations. All three, like Mark Twain, attempt to transform an essentially oral tradition into a literary one, whether in the Western slang of Jean Stafford's novel, The Mountain Lion (1947), or her group of stories set in the West; the innocent but wise voice of Kaye Gibbons’ Huck Finn‑like Ellen Foster; or the illiterate diary entries of Ernest Gaines' hero, Jefferson, as he awaits his execution on death row in the racist South of the 1940's. Ernest Gaines, author of A Lesson Before Dying, will conduct a class during the course as a special guest.

Dr. Mary Ann Wilson is a visiting professor from the University of Southwestern Louisiana, where she is Associate Professor of English. Dr. Wilson has published widely in twentieth‑century American Literature and Women's Studies. She also authored several entries in The Mark Twain Encyclopedia, edited by J.R. LeMaster and James D. Wilson (Garland, 1993).

For more information about registration and housing please contact the Elmira College Office of Continuing Education and Graduate Studies:

Telephone: (607) 735‑1825

Fax: (607) 735‑1759

E‑mail: summer@elmira.edu