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A Lesson Before Dying

Contributors

By Ernest J. Gaines

Read by Lionel Mark Smith

Read by Roger Guenveur Smith

Formats and Prices

Price

$14.98

Format

Audiobook Download (Abridged)

Format:

Audiobook Download (Abridged) $14.98

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around April 1, 2006. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

This Pulitzer Prize winning book follows the real-life story of the friendship formed between a disheartened schoolteacher and a Black man falsely accused of murder in Jim Crow era Louisiana.

Based on Ernest J. Gaines’ National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel, A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Louisiana Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young illiterate black man, is falsely convicted of murder and is sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, the plantation schoolteacher, agrees to talk with the condemned man.
 
The disheartened Wiggins had once harbored dreams of escaping from his impoverished youth, yet he returned to his hometown after university, to teach children whose lives seemed as unpromising as Jefferson’s. The two men forge a bond as they come to understand what it means to resist and defy one’s fate.

On Sale
Apr 1, 2006
Publisher
Hachette Audio
ISBN-13
9781594837647

Ernest J. Gaines

About the Author

Ernest Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish near New Roads, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional works. He is a writer-in-residence emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Gaines received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1993 for his lifetime achievements; was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s highest decorations, in 1996; and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004. He and his wife, Dianne, live in Oscar, Louisiana.

Learn more about this author