A Lesson Before Dying
A Lesson Before Dying is Ernest J. Gaines's 1993 novel, set in the fictional Cajun and Black plantation community of Bayonne in southern Louisiana in late 1948. Jefferson, a young Black man with no part in the crime, is the only survivor of a botched liquor-store robbery in which his two companions and the white shopkeeper are killed. He is convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to die in the electric chair. His grieving godmother Miss Emma cannot keep him from dying, but she can decide how he dies. She asks Grant Wiggins, a college-educated young Black teacher at the local plantation school who has come home reluctantly, to visit Jefferson in the parish jail every week before the execution and teach him that he is a man, not, as the defense attorney called him in his summation, a hog. Grant does not want to do it. The slow, reluctant relationship he builds with Jefferson is the heart of the book, and one of the great American novels of the 1990s.
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In 1940s Louisiana, a schoolteacher is asked to visit a young Black man sentenced to die for a crime he did not commit. What passes between them shapes everyone in their small town.
Yes. A Lesson Before Dying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1993 and was an Oprah's Book Club selection in 1997, which brought it to a wide readership. It is widely taught in American literature and African American studies courses.
A Lesson Before Dying is fictional but draws on real practices of Jim Crow-era Louisiana, including segregated courtrooms and electric-chair executions. Ernest J. Gaines based the setting on the rural communities he grew up in.
A Lesson Before Dying was written by Ernest J. Gaines, published in 1993 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
A Lesson Before Dying is 256 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, A Lesson Before Dying takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
A Lesson Before Dying is a standalone novel by Ernest J. Gaines, not part of a series.
A Lesson Before Dying is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
