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A Lesson Before Dying

by Ernest Gaines

June 1997

Synopsis

A Lesson Before Dying"Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940's, '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." (Publisher)

Reviews

  • "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." (Carl Senna - New York Times)
  • "The lesson succeeds appropriately through an act of language. Wiggins gets the young man to write his thoughts in a journal, nine pages of semi-literate dialect that should not work in 20th century fiction but does because Gaines delivers a written equivalent of authentic oral expression, not a romanticized rendering of black English. That is not all the author gets just right. The year may be 1948, but the plantation manners are circa 1848. There is an ominous courtesy between the races. The whites are soft-spoken and patronizing. The blacks reply with exaggerated deference and little eye contact. Few writers have caught this routine indignity as well as Gaines. Fewer still have his dramatic instinct for conveying the malevolence of racism and injustice without the usual accompanying self-righteousness." (R.Z. Sheppard - Time)

Book Club Rating and Comments

If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.

Other Books by Ernest Gaines

  • 'Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman'
  • 'Bloodline'
  • 'Catherine Carmier'
  • 'A Gathering of Old Men'
  • 'In My Father's House'
  • 'Of Love and Dust'