A Lesson Before Dying

Set on a plantation outside Bayonne, Louisiana during the late 1940s, Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying is the eloquent account of one man’s struggle to come to terms with his own mortality and another man’s attempt to guide him in this process. The novel follows the relationship of Jefferson, a young black man wrongfully sentenced to die, and Grant, the plantation’s college-educated teacher who is reluctant to become involved despite the urging of his aunt and the African American community. As their relationship develops against a backdrop of racial segregation and injustice, each must confront what it takes to be a man in the face of the certainty of death and the uncertainties of life.