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.
bn.com
Two African-American men in rural Louisiana are pulled together by circumstance in this gripping novel. A young teacher who has come back to his hometown to help raise the poor quality of education is reluctantly persuaded by his aunt to counsel a man on death row. Emotionally charged and written in a straightforward, powerful style, Gaines sketches the dramatic moments between teacher and inmate with warmth and insight. Read by Jay Long.
Carl Senna
Despite the novel's gallows humor and an atmosphere of pervasively harsh racism, the characters, black and white, are humanly complex and have some redeeming quality...."A Lesson Before Dying," though it suffers an occasional stylistic lapse, powerfully evokes in its understated tone the "new wants" in the 1940's that created the revolution of the 1960's. Ernest J. Gaines has written a moving and truthful work of fiction. -- New York Times
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Gaines's NBCC Award-winning novel tells of the relationship forged between a young black man on death row and his teacher in 1940s Louisiana. (June)
Library Journal
What do you tell an innocent youth who was at the wrong place at the wrong time and now faces death in the electric chair? What do you say to restore his self-esteem when his lawyer has publicly described him as a dumb animal? What do you tell a youth humiliated by a lifetime of racism so that he can face death with dignity? The task belongs to Grant Wiggins, the teacher of the Negro plantation school who narrates the story. Grant grew up on the Louisiana plantation but broke away to go to the university. He returns to help his people but struggles over ``whether I should act like the teacher that I was, or like the nigger that I was supposed to be.'' The powerful message Grant tells the youth transforms him from a ``hog'' to a hero, and the reader is not likely to forget it, either. Gaines's earlier works include A Gathering of Old Men ( LJ 9/83) and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Bantam, 1982). BOMC and Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selections; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/92.-- Joanne Snapp, Randolph-Macon Coll . , Ashland, Va.
School Library Journal
YA-- No breathless courtroom triumphs or dramatic reprieves alleviate the sad progress toward execution in this latest novel by the author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Bantam, 1982). The condemned man is Jefferson, a poorly educated man/child whose only crimes are a dim intelligence, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and being black in rural Louisiana in the late 1940s. To everyone, even his own defense attorney, he's an animal, too dumb to understand what is happening to him. But his godmother, Miss Emma, decides that Jefferson will die a man. To accomplish just that, she brings Grant Wiggins, the teacher at the plantation's one-room school and narrator of the novel, into the story. Emotionally blackmailed by two strong-willed old ladies, Grant reluctantly begins visiting Jefferson, committing both men to the painful task of self-discovery. As in his earlier novels, Gaines evokes a sense of reality through rich detail and believable characters in this simple, moving story. YAs who seek thought-provoking reading will enjoy this glimpse of life in the rural South just before the civil rights movement.-- Carolyn E. Gecan, Thomas Jefferson Sci-Tech, Fairfax County, VA
Sacred Fire
A Lesson Before Dying is a coming-of-age story set in a small
Louisiana town in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young
black man involved in a shoot-out during a robbery, is convicted
of murder and sentenced to the electric chair. Says the defending
attorney to the jury, "What justice would there be to take this
life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in
the electric chair as this."
Grant Wiggins, the hope of the community, has returned to
teach school after having left for a university education. He fights
internal demons, his aunt, and his guilt-ridden sense of community in
deciding whether to escape the small town (and the small-
town mentality) or to stay. He receives a visit from his aunt,
Jefferson's godmother. With the pain of history on her face, the
godmother spoke. "Called him a hog... I don't want them to
kill no hog," she said. "I want a man to go to that chair, on his
own two feet."
Grant's mandate was to instill in Jefferson a firm sense of self
in the short time prior to his execution—a Herculean task, in that
Grant had yet to come to terms with his own expectations of
himself. In the end, and through their interaction, the two men
come to realizations that allow each of them to successfully meet
their demons.
In A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest Gaines personifies the angst
of expectation that comes with being the first of a generation to
succeed, the resolute power of community, and the importance of
reciprocity—giving back to that which nurtured us.
Kirkus Reviews
Two black men (one a teacher, the other a death row inmate) struggle to live, and die, with dignity, in Gaines's most powerful and moving work since The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971). The year is 1948. Harry Truman may have integrated the Armed Forces, but down in the small Cajun town of Bayonne, Louisiana, where the blacks still shuffle submissively for their white masters, little has changed since slavery. When a white liquor- store owner is killed during a robbery attempt, along with his two black assailants, the innocent black bystander Jefferson gets death, despite the defense plea that "I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this." Hog. The word lingers like a foul odor and weighs as heavily as the sentence on Jefferson and the woman who raised him, his "nannan" (godmother) Miss Emma. She needs an image of Jefferson going to his death like a man, and she turns to the young teacher at the plantation school for help. Meanwhile, Grant Wiggins (the narrator) has his own problems. He loves his people but hates himself for teaching on the white man's terms; visiting Jefferson in jail will just mean more kowtowing, so he goes along reluctantly, prodded by his strong-willed Tante Lou and his girlfriend Vivian. The first visits are a disaster: Jefferson refuses to speak and will not eat his nannan's cooking, which breaks the old lady's heart. But eventually Grant gets through to him ("a hero does for others"); Jefferson eats Miss Emma's gumbo and astonishes himself by writing whole pages in a diarya miracle, water from the rock. When he walks to the chair, he is the strongest man in the courthouse. By containing unbearably painful emotions withinsimple declarative sentences and everyday speech rhythms, Gaines has written a novel that is not only never maudlin, but approaches the spare beauty of a classic.
From the Publisher
"This majestic, moving novel is an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives." —Chicago Tribune"A Lesson Before Dying reconfirms Ernest J. Gaines's position as an important American writer." — Boston Globe
"Enormously moving. . . . Gaines unerringly evokes the place and time about which he writes." —Los Angeles Times
“A quietly moving novel [that] takes us back to a place we've been before to impart a lesson for living.” —San Francisco Chronicle
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