A Lesson Before Dying (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Ernest J. Gaines
- First Published: 1993
- Type of Plot: Social realism
- Time of Work: 1948-1949
- Setting: The former slave quarter on a plantation in rural Louisiana
- Principal Characters: Grant Wiggins, Jefferson, Tante Lou, Emma Glenn, Reverend Mose Ambrose, Matthew Antoine, Vivian, Henri Pinchot, Sam Guidry, Paul
- 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
The Novel
In A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest Gaines once again takes his reader to a familiar fictional setting based on his boyhood home in Point Coupée Parish near New Roads, Louisiana, which becomes the fictional St. Raphael Parish, with Bayonne as its parish seat. A small town of about six thousand inhabitants, Bayonne is one of the two main settings in the novel. The other is the old slave quarter on an antebellum plantation owned by Henri Pinchot located a few miles away, near the St. Charles River. The year is 1948, a time when segregation and racial injustice...
[The entire page is 2587 words long]
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