Other editions of book A Lesson Before Dying

Based on the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel by Ernest J. Gaines, 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 home town 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 own fate. A L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring: Rick Foucheux, Beatrice Winde, Keith Glover, Jerry Whiddon, Jamahl Marsh, Linda Powell and Jefferson A. Russell.

A New York Times Bestseller, Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, A Big Read Title -- Jefferson, barely literate, is on trial for a murder he didn’t commit. Grant Wiggins, college-educated, teaches at a plantation school. When his court-appointed lawyer defends Jefferson by saying he would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair, the man’s godmother appeals to Wiggins to help Jefferson face his death with dignity.