NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • 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. "An instant classic." —Chicago Tribune A “majestic, moving novel...an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives" (Chicago Tribune), from the critically acclaimed author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. "A Lesson Before Dying reconfirms Ernest J. Gaines's position as an important American writer." —Boston Globe "Enormously moving.... Gaines unerringly evokes the place and time about which he writes." —Los Angeles Times “A quietly moving novel [that] takes us back to a place we've been before to impart a lesson for living.” —San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
Ernest James Gaineswas a novelist, short story writer, and teacher. Born to a sharecropping family, Ernest James Gaines was picking cotton in the fields by age nine and only attended school five or six months a year. When he was fifteen, he moved to California to join his mother and stepfather, because his Louisiana parish had no high school for African Americans. It was in California that he began writing. He attended San Francisco State University, served in the army, and won a writing fellowship to Stanford University. Gaines was a MacArthur Foundation fellow, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, awarded the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts, and inducted into the French Order of Arts and Letters as a Chevalier.
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