Synopsis
In this story of injustice and redemption set in rural Louisiana during the late 1940s, Grant Wiggins, a backwoods schoolmaster, is asked visit a young black prisoner on death row. Jefferson, the prisoner, was falsely accused and convicted of murder and is sentenced to hang, and Wiggins's job, once he realizes the impossibility of overturning the verdict, is to prepare the boy for death. Although, as a nonbeliever, Wiggins at first finds himself in competition with the minister for the boy's attention, he eventually comes to see that the cultivation of any instinct of love--human or religious--is the essence of salvation, both for Jefferson and himself. Ernest J. Gaines's morally wrenching novel has become a classic of American literature.

Details
Publication Date:	1997-10-01

Size
Length:	256 pages
Height:	8.3 in
Width:	5.3 in
Thickness:	0.8 in
Weight:	7.2 oz

Publisher's Note
Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, "A Lesson Before Dying" is an "enormously moving" ("Los Angeles Times") novel of one man condemned to die for a crime he did not commit and a young man who visits him in his cell. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting--and defying--the expected. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

Industry Reviews
"Like Joyce in his early stories, Gaines is writing here about moments of illumination and about what it means to be human...a strongly felt and--in the best sense--ambiguous novel."
Newsday (Long Island, N.Y.) - Francine Prose

"This is a painful story told with spare eloquence, and the resonance it creates long after one's reading gives it a classic dimension."
Styron