A Lesson Before Dying (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Ernest J. Gaines
- First Published: 1993
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, Social realism
- Subjects: African Americans, Civil rights, Teaching or teachers, Prisons, Racism, Blacks, Murder or homicide, South or Southerners, 1940’s, World War II, Capital punishment, Cajuns, Human behavior, Pigs
- Locales: Louisiana
A Lesson Before Dying is set in the late 1940's, in the former slave quarters of the Marshall plantation and the town of Bayonne. Gaines takes his reader back to a time when racial segregation was both legal and endemic in the South, a time when black people could barely hope for recognition of their humanity, much less find justice in a court of law.
It is in this world that a dirt-poor, semiliterate black man, Jefferson, is accused of murdering a white liquor-store owner. In the Bayonne courthouse, Jefferson is quickly condemned to death by an all-white jury. Although...
[The entire page is 988 words long]
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