A Lesson Before Dying - Softcover

Gaines, Ernest

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1410425444 ISBN 13: 9781410425447

Publisher: Kennebec Large Print, 2010

Synopsis

A New York Times Bestseller, Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, A Big Read Title -- Jefferson, barely literate, is on trial for a murder he didn’t commit. Grant Wiggins, college-educated, teaches at a plantation school. When his court-appointed lawyer defends Jefferson by saying he would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair, the man’s godmother appeals to Wiggins to help Jefferson face his death with dignity.

About this title

Review:

Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 1997: In a small Cajun community in 1940s Louisiana, a young black man is about to go to the electric chair for murder. A white shopkeeper had died during a robbery gone bad; though the young man on trial had not been armed and had not pulled the trigger, in that time and place, there could be no doubt of the verdict or the penalty.

"I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be..." So begins Grant Wiggins, the narrator of Ernest J. Gaines's powerful exploration of race, injustice, and resistance, A Lesson Before Dying. If young Jefferson, the accused, is confined by the law to an iron-barred cell, Grant Wiggins is no less a prisoner of social convention. University educated, Grant has returned to the tiny plantation town of his youth, where the only job available to him is teaching in the small plantation church school. More than 75 years after the close of the Civil War, antebellum attitudes still prevail: African Americans go to the kitchen door when visiting whites and the two races are rigidly separated by custom and by law. Grant, trapped in a career he doesn't enjoy, eaten up by resentment at his station in life, and angered by the injustice he sees all around him, dreams of taking his girlfriend Vivian and leaving Louisiana forever. But when Jefferson is convicted and sentenced to die, his grandmother, Miss Emma, begs Grant for one last favor: to teach her grandson to die like a man.

As Grant struggles to impart a sense of pride to Jefferson before he must face his death, he learns an important lesson as well: heroism is not always expressed through action--sometimes the simple act of resisting the inevitable is enough. Populated by strong, unforgettable characters, Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying offers a lesson for a lifetime.

From the Publisher:

6 1.5-hour cassettes

About this edition

• Publisher: Kennebec Large Print
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1410425444
• ISBN 13: 9781410425447
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 340