Set in a small Louisiana Cajun community in the late 1940s, A Lesson Before Dying brings to life the story of two men as they struggle to come to terms with their individual, yet linked, destinies.

Jefferson, a young, illiterate black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shootout that leaves three men dead. The sole survivor, he is tried as something utterly less than a man, falsely convicted of murder and sentenced to death by electrocution.

Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to the plantation school to teach. As he grapples with his decision whether to carry out his duty to his community or to escape from this perceived burden to another state, his aunt and Jefferson's godmother persuade him to visit Jefferson's cell and 'humanize' him by imparting his learning and his pride on the young man before his death.

These two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting--and defying--their fates.

In this brilliantly written, heart-rending novel Ernest J. Gaines demonstrates a profound understanding of the human psyche and a compassion for a people and their struggle against a callous society. Along with Toni Morrison's Beloved and William Faulkner's Light In August, A Lesson Before Dying will surely take its place among great stories of identity and destiny of our time.
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The completely unabridged audio of A Lesson Before Dying is available on audio casette, read by Jay Long. 6 casettes/8 hours
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The deceptively bucolic Louisiana countryside is the setting for this compelling love story, where Blacks, Cajuns, and whites maintain an uneasy coexistence.
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A powerful depiction of racial tensions flaring from the death of a cajun farmer at the hands of a black man on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation.
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Reverend Philip Martin--a respected minister and civil rights leader devoted to his family--comes face to face with the sins of his youth in the person of Robert X, a young, unkempt, vaguely sinister stranger in a rural Louisiana community.
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Set on a Louisiana plantation, Of Love and Dust is the story of a contest of wills between two men--Marcus, a prisoner sent to work in the fields, and Bonbon, his Cajun overseer, and the triumph of spirit over conflict.
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These five stories take place in the cane fields, sharecroppers' shacks, and decaying plantation houses of Jim Crow Louisiana, the terrain of Gaines's great novels A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying. In Gaines's hands, this country becomes as familiar, and as haunted by cruelty, suffering, and courage, as Ralph Ellison's Harlem or William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.