A Lesson Before Dying (1993) - Ernest J. Gaines

Written by Ernest J. Gaines
Read by Lionel Mark Smith, Roger Guenveur Smith
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Abridged

Length: 3 hrs and 3 mins
Abridged Audiobook
Release date: 12-16-99
Publisher: Hachette Audio

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, A Lesson Before Dying is a deep and compassionate novel about a young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to visit a black youth on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting.

Jefferson is an innocent and unwitting party to a deadly liquor store shoot-out in the 1940s. As the only survivor, he is tried and convicted of murder and sentenced to death. When Jefferson’s own attorney claims that executing him would be tantamount to killing a hog, his incensed godmother, Miss Emma, turns to teacher Grant Wiggins, pleading with him to gain access to the jailed youth and help him to face his death by electrocution with dignity.

Grant Wiggins, a university-trained teacher at the plantation school, feels mingled love, loyalty and hatred for the poor plantation community where he was born and raised. He longs to leave the South and is reluctant to assume the level of leadership and involvement that helping Jefferson would require. Eventually, however, the two men, vastly different in potential yet equally degraded by racism, achieve a relationship that transforms them both. Suspense rises as it becomes clear that the integrity of the entire local black community depends on Jefferson’s courage.

Though the conclusion is inevitable, Gaines invests the story with emotional power and universal resonance

A Lesson Before Dying is Ernest J. Gaines’ eighth novel, published in 1993. While it is a fictional work, it is loosely based on the true story of Willie Francis, a young black man sentenced to death by the electric chair twice in Louisiana, in 1945 and 1947.

In1999 HBO premiered A Lesson Before Dying, which subsequently received two Emmy Awards

Abridged is the only recording to which I have access.