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: | 1997-09-01 | | Narrated by: | Jay Long | | Edition Description: | Unabridged |
| Size | | Height: | 6.3 in | | Width: | 4.3 in | | Thickness: | 2.5 in | | Weight: | 9.6 oz |
Publisher's Note
6 cassettes / approx. 8 hours
Unabridged
Read by Jay Long
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
"A Lesson Before Dying reconfirms Ernest J. Gaines's position as an important American writer."
--Boston Globe
A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shootout in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to the plantation school to teach. As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and Jefferson's godmother persuade him to visit Jefferson in his cell and impart his learning and his pride to Jefferson before his death. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting -- and defying -- the unexpected.
Ernest J.. Gaines brings to this novel the same rich sense of place, the same deep understanding of the human psyche, and the same compassion for a people and their struggle that have informed his previous, highly praised works of fiction.
"Enormously moving . . . Gaines unerringly evokes the place and time about which he writes." -- Los Angeles Times
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
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